Window Horses is an animated feature! It's about love (it's always about love…) - love of family, poetry, history, culture. Here's the story: Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry.
Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.
This film is our small effort to try and add a little more peace, love and understanding to our increasingly complex and conflicted world through art, poetry, history and cultur
In a world of AI and self-driving cars, who determines the ethics algorithm to handle emergency situations? In this VR vignette, the user is slowed down to bullet-time, becoming the computer, and forced to confront a hard decision where there is plenty of data, but no easy answer.
Set in Palestine, Israel and Jordan, Grassroots in Dry Lands reveals a unique human-rights-based approach to democratic change taking root in neighbourhoods across the region. Through intimate access to the world of social workers committed to the belief that all peoples deserve the same rights, filmmaker Helene Klodawsky delivers an unprecedented perspective on the Middle East, showing how the seeds planted by these passionate activists are producing hope for lasting change.
The expansion of Canada’s oil sands industry—one of the most polluting on the planet—represents a huge environmental challenge. And, as the documentary Pipelines, Power and Democracy makes clear, when it comes to fossil fuels, political power doesn’t always lie where we think it does.
From the hallways of Quebec’s National Assembly, where parliamentary power resides, to the campaigns waged by environmental defence groups and the big media splashes made by some activists, director Olivier D. Asselin follows the journeys of four people who adopt a variety of tactics—showing that it is still possible to effect change.
Over the course of two years, Asselin documents the growth of an anti-pipeline movement in Quebec that rekindled a sense of collective purpose and solidarity.
The result is a film that urges action at a moment in which our planet’s fragile ecological balance is threatened by those who embrace economic growth at any cost.
En 1982, avec l’adoption de l’article 23 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, la Constitution canadienne reconnaît aux minorités linguistiques le droit à l’éducation dans leur propre langue. Mais les minorités francophones hors Québec font alors face à une dure réalité : les infrastructures nécessaires pour recevoir une éducation française manquent ou sont carrément inexistantes.
BAM is a story of rage. In a dense inner city haunted by primordial gods, an unassuming young boxer struggles to understand the disturbing consequences of his explosive temper—both inside and outside the ring. While many of Howie Shia’s films (Flutter, Ice Ages) juxtapose mythological archetypes with modern urbanity, BAM takes a distinctly darker turn: the young boxer’s battles are as heroic as they are tortured, as eternal as they are alienating. Is the violence inside of him a conditioned reaction, an innate reflex, or a divine right?
The Faith Project is an immersive media experience that intimately observes the rituals of seven young Canadians from different faith traditions. Religious identity and expression can be very personal topics, but the practitioners profiled in this project offer viewers a deep, privileged understanding of their diverse faiths. Set in a specifically Canadian context, the website and app include supplementary content that deepens viewers’ understanding of each interviewee’s faith. Shuttling between the project’s short portraits, striking commonalities between different traditions emerge. The articulate, busy young women and men at the heart of The Faith Project weave faith into their daily lives not as an obligation but as something that is essential to their identity and place in the world. Whether it is smudging or singing, a mandir or a mosque, a Siddur or the Bible, it’s clear how essential spiritual practice is to the bustling, stressful daily lives and identities of these young Canadians.
The true story of a “nice Jewish boy with Buddhist inclinations” who suffers a heart attack. At the crossroads of documentary and animation, Sheldon Cohen’s film combines wry humour and philosophical musings to show that, sometimes, what feels like the end is really only just the beginning.
Everyone loves potatoes in Potatoland, as they are the bounty on which they survive. After his village is struck with misfortune, Chips finds himself to be sorely lacking in potatoes. Through innovation and human contact, he must learn to survive without them in order to save his community and overturn the potatosaurus Monster's dominance.
I Love Potatoes is an adventure game for 7 to 77 year olds that deals with social innovation and sustainable economy issues in a slightly absurd, funny and quirky manner. Available for the Web, tablets and mobiles (IOS and Android), this playful journey will teach the steps of social innovation to people of all ages. Download this game whose narrative is designed to plant new ideas and harvest some change.
A Vali Fugulin game co-created with Minority and produced by the NFB. Illustrations by Patrick Doyon.