A Better Man grew out of my personal and professional experiences with domestic violence. I hope that sharing my personal search for justice and healing will contribute to the struggle to end domestic violence.
I desperately want domestic violence to stop. Art, storytelling, and deep, painful conversations are an integral part of the solution. By getting closer to the truth of what survivors experience, and of why men choose to use violence, we can help stop the violence.
A Better Man documents a personal experiment for me and my abusive ex-partner, Steve—a step towards healing, understanding, and accountability. My hope is that our story will motivate others to find new, creative solutions to a problem that continues to be a global epidemic.
This film was truly a community effort. Its seed funding came from more than 1,000 contributors from 30 countries. Artists, advocates, labour unions, leaders in the women’s community, friends, and family all stepped up, lending emotional, financial, creative, and political support to this extremely challenging project. Our production team combined expertise in documentary film with experience with the complex subject of domestic violence. The compassion of this community provided the support that Steve and I needed throughout the process.
During the nearly five years of making this film, I have had the privilege of meeting dozens of people working on innovative solutions to the problem of domestic violence. In nearly every community, there are advocates, activists, counsellors, and others working on new approaches to justice, new ways of healing, and new paths to non-violence for the people who use violence. Their work is deeply inspiring and deserves our close attention.
In telling my story, I stand on the shoulders of so many survivors who bravely told theirs. A Better Man is also held up and inspired by a powerful and growing movement to end domestic violence that has been working on behalf of survivors for decades. If this film can help contribute to this movement, if it can inspire more courageous conversations in relationships, schools, and workplaces, then we will have begun to achieve our goal.
The Road Forward, a musical documentary by Marie Clements, connects a pivotal moment in Canada’s civil rights history—the beginnings of Indian Nationalism in the 1930s—with the powerful momentum of First Nations activism today.
Clements paints an electrifying picture of how a tiny movement, the Native Brotherhood and Native Sisterhood, became a powerful voice for social, political and legal advocacy, eventually effecting profound change at the national level. The Road Forward’s stunningly shot musical sequences, performed by an ensemble of some of Canada’s finest vocalists and musicians, seamlessly connect past and present with soaring vocals, blues, rock, and traditional beats.
The Road Forward is a rousing tribute to the fighters for First Nations rights, a soul-resounding historical experience, and a visceral call to action.
From out of nowhere, the most beautiful girl in the world sits at the table across from me at the library. Is this a stroke of good luck or bad? Her smile paralyzes me. I can’t talk to her because I don’t know her, but I can’t get to know her because I won’t talk to her…
NADINE, the first collaboration between filmmaker Patrick Péris and the National Film Board of Canada, is an ambitious work that blends live action footage with various animation techniques.
Produced by the National Film Board, Naked Island brings together some of Canada’s most talented animators in a series of 14 super-short and incisive films that expose the dark underbelly of modern-day society. Blending the art of animation with the format of advertising, these filmmakers use wit and satire to address topics from global warming to politics to our obsession with technology.
Ranging from Oscar® winners and nominees to emerging talent in animation and fine arts, these filmmakers make bold statements in a variety of styles to create ultimate anti-advertisements that encourage us to stop and think.
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.