In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a gluttonous bear and a muddy boar. Together, the haughty brutes march off towards Hedgehog’s home to see just what is so precious about this “castle, shiny and huge.” What they find amazes them and sparks a tense and prickly standoff.
This sumptuous and delicately choreographed stop-motion fable—made entirely of needled felt—revives the timeless and timely notion of cultivating our own place of safety, dignity and comfort, no matter how big or small. Like a welcome blanket on a chilly day, Hedgehog’s Home is a warm and universal tale for young and old that reminds us there truly is no place like home.
A co-production between the National Film Board of Canada and Bonobostudio, Hedgehog’s Home is exquisitely directed by Eva Cvijanović and based on the classic story by Branko Ćopić, a writer from the former Yugoslavia.
Eighteen teenagers. Seven life-changing weeks.
Every summer, the Royal Canadian Air Cadets offers its top cadets the chance to participate in an elite flight-training camp. As the Crow Flies follows a group of these young men and women as they undergo seven weeks of training to get their pilot’s license in an intense program that normally takes six to eight months.
Casting an especially affectionate and empathetic eye on her female subjects, filmmaker Tess Girard—herself a graduate of the program—creates a unique and intimate portrait of an extraordinary, yet also very recognizable, group of 17-year-olds as they come of age. As one cadet says, the program is “not only learning about flying, but also about how intricate everything is.”
He’s a magician. She’s a firefighter. Isolating themselves from the chaos of a world in turmoil, the two lovers live in a crane basket high in the sky, where they go about their daily business. Their challenge: keep their heads, here up above it all, while everything falls apart down below. But when reality calls—when fires need quenching and people need entertaining—how can they best make themselves useful in a world gone off the rails?
Noémie Marsily and Carl Roosens, whose animated musical short Around the Lake charmed festival-goers in 2013, return with I Don’t Feel Anything Anymore, an unsettling satire of life in an unsettled world. Drawn in an evocative style with simple, stark lines, the film takes us from one bizarre and startling situation to the next. This twisting tale with occasional flights of absurdist fantasy is accompanied by a rich soundtrack that captures the confusion of modern life, blending odd sounds, music and even the voice of Quebec soprano Natalie Choquette.
Coming in the spring of 2017, Dream is an online interactive project that generates individual micro-experiences based on the unique mechanisms of dreams. Using the audience’s drawings of their dreams, with their singular logic and special relationship to time, the project creates a grammar that transcends the traditional limits of non-linear storytelling.
Dream also marks phase one in a long-term process to build a vast database of dreams. And it all starts here – at the 10th anniversary of IDFA’s DocLab, with a happening in which audience members can contribute their dream stories. Their writings and drawings will be scanned and uploaded in real time, and then translated into live music and visual projections.
While we sleep, we assemble dreams with the peculiar logic of our memory fragments and emotions. This project explores this liminal area between semi-consciousness and waking reality to create dream stories that will not fade with first light.
Freelance reporter Jesse Rosenfeld has made the Middle East the focus of his work. This film follows his journey through the region, showing us its thorny geopolitical realities and exploring how a reporter’s job has changed in the age of the Internet.
From Egypt to Turkey and Iraq by way of Israel and Palestine, the documentary captures the ups and downs of an independent and unconventional kind of journalism, one intent on making the voice of critical news heard in the communications jungle.
Bluefin is a tale of epic stakes set in North Lake, Prince Edward Island, known as the “tuna capital of the world.” Local fishermen swear the spectacular Atlantic bluefin tuna are so plentiful here they literally eat out of people’s hands. But a number of top scientists have gathered evidence that shows the species is on the brink of collapse. Can both claims be true?
Memento mori is an evocative cinematic journey alongside the living and the dying, bringing to the screen a human drama never-before captured on film. With remarkable access to Canada’s busiest organ-transplant hospital, we witness one of the most profound experiences in any human life: the loss of a child, and the agonizing decision this tragedy demands. Created by two acclaimed Canadian documentarians, director Niobe Thompson and producer Rosvita Dransfeld, Memento mori grips the viewer in a relentless, emotional embrace—propelling us from moments of unexpected joy to unbearable heartbreak—until the very final frame. An arresting tour de force of vérité filmmaking, immersing us completely in a world few of us understand but which we’ll all one day encounter.
Mystery of the Secret Room takes viewers on a spellbinding voyage between the real and the imaginary. An inspiring portrait of family, adversity, and resilience, this richly hued animated short tells the tale of 10-year-old Grace, who uses her creative superpowers to navigate the emotional landscape of her mother’s depression.
Writer/filmmaker Wanda Nolan collaborated with animator Claire Blanchet to weave together a deeply moving story. Hand-drawn animations bring two distinct worlds to life: the muted, solid world of “reality” and the saturated palette of Grace’s imagination.
Through a mixture of techniques and media, including drawn backgrounds, landscape photography, and ink and pastel on paper, Mystery of the Secret Room offers a textured story-world full of surprises, challenges, and emotions, while celebrating the transformative powers of literature and the imagination.
We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice by veteran filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin documents the nine-year legal saga pitting the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations against the Canadian government. Arguing that Indigenous children on reserves and in Yukon received subpar services due to the government’s discriminatory practices, the plaintiffs eventually won the trial in 2016.