Dreams of Sunlight Through Trees

Short

A visual poetic collage and a place of joy. Awaiting the decision from here to there

Short

Before the European colonization, a bispitirual person called Woman Dress used to roam across the Prairies, listening and telling tales. The film includes archival footage and historical reenactments to pass along this story from the Cuthand family’s oral tradition.

Short

Inspired by a dream and produced on an iPhone, Guardian of Sleep features an array of images, animations of petroglyph-like markings, running herds of caribou and filmed footage of the baton-twirling artist leading a parade from a forest. Illuminating Longboy’s long-standing interest in emergent technologies and their potential, not only as a tool or a medium, but also as metaphorical constructs that, in this instance, mirror the forms dreams take as inherently collagist.

Short

A journey into Aly’s world and his personal growth through the eyes of his new furry, Eden. Aly opens up about his next character, Lusia, who will resemble him in every way.

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When Ellie receives the news that their best friend Sam is leaving for art school the next morning, it seems like their entire summer together has been ruined. With the help of their friends, not only do they experience the night of their lives, but they find courage within their hearts to make it count.

Short

An audio sensory experience that follows a sleepless Noah as they navigate a dreamscape filled with old memories of their current relationship with Connor. Someone who he cannot fix.

Short

A weekend at a music festival is brought to a grinding halt when Tai is confronted by a white person wearing a Native Ceremonial Headdress. He retreats into his mind where a roundtable of various versions of his identity meets to come up with the perfect thing to say.

Made au CanadaCompetitionShort

Between loads of laundry at the corner laundromat, Cooper shares the tumultuous story of her gender reassignment journey.

CompetitionFeature

PORTUGUESE • ENGLISH ST | Wellington (defiantly nicknamed Baby) trades his detention centre cell for the streets of São Paulo, absorbed into the life of an in-demand “escort” with old school methods. Torn between this erotic father figure, two chosen families, and the mother who left him, Wellington must discern which link is the strongest. Against a backdrop of corrupt cops, vengeful kingpins, and Brazilian ball culture, maybe-18-year-old Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) falls for 42-year-old sex worker cum drug dealer Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), who has a son not much younger than Wellington being raised by lesbian mothers. The two share a charged, teasing bond with yo-yoing power dynamics. Wellington softens Ronaldo, schooling him in voguing’s ebullience and showing him his battle scars, while Ronaldo grounds his protege, giving him boxing lessons while doling out paternal advice and setting strict boundaries. Boundaries that Ronaldo is desperate to maintain and Wellington comes to resent when youthful potential and a biological parent draw him away. Propelled by Marcelo Caetano’s stylish direction, this gritty coming-of-age tale wrestles with themes of love and coercion, considering what’s still possible for a restless heart when a ‘baby’ becomes a man.

CompetitionFeature

After Nino shows Iva the ropes, the two cable car drivers woo one another in increasingly ingenious ways. Day after day, the young women pass high above a quiet Georgian valley twisted with mist, cherishing each moment of connection. But when sweetness slides into sensuality, where will it send them? A man has died, his coffin carted above the village, and Iva (Mathilde Irrmann) inherits his crooked home and high-flying occupation. At first, villagers treat her with an enigmatic disdain, and she spends her days transporting customers and goods back and forth in disquiet, stealing glances at Nino (Nini Soselia). The flirtation grows as intense as their ongoing chess game, set to the rhythm of the rusted gears and their little kindnesses. Together, they will take on a surly widow (Niara Chichinadze) and lecherous boss (Zuka Papuashvili) as their courtship reaches new heights. Auteur Veit Helmer’s Gondola has the raw intensity of silent cinema and the enchanting whimsy of Amélie. Impelled by its beguiling leads and breathtaking cinematography, the film is a love letter to the countryside and those who live there, and an invitation to let your heart soar.

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Small towns are no place for secrets. Among the churchgoing folk of a Newfoundland fishing village, Eliza leads a double-life: exploring transgressive photography while managing an unspoken romance with a shunned woman and the insistent advances of a married man. Hearsay only two steps behind. Sneaking around the neighbours, Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky) stages increasingly revealing photoshoots in locations both remote and close to home—perhaps too close. With every new post to her 318K Instagram followers, she imperils the careful balance she’s cultivated between her coexistence with fellow villagers, her burgeoning romance with Toni (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), and the married man (Peter Mooney) whose desire for her titillates as much as it terrifies. As a church fundraiser she’s helping to organize approaches, so too does a blaze of gossip, and choices are made that could leave her forever shattered. By turns kinky and kind-hearted, Melanie Oates’ second feature explores our wildest selves with a complexity that continues to deepen through to the final striking frame. All the while, embodying a true sense of place, depicting the rough shores and spirited personalities of one of the most isolated—and spectacular—of Canadian locales.

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Inspired by true events, in 1970 an unorthodox mother sends her offbeat son from New Brunswick on a wintry cross-country mission past Quebec to retrieve his brother from Toronto after a public sex violation. Antics ensue in the Two-Solitudes atmosphere, bursting with revealing humour about brotherly love and French-English relations. In bravura performances, Alan Cumming plays motormouth Perley—dressed in an ushanka and ascot, taxidermied dog tucked under his arm—and Charlie Creed-Miles is Weldon—a gruff stoic in crooked glasses. These oddball siblings travel through frozen nights and across the language divide as they bicker, break down, and ultimately bond in their journey through central and eastern Canada. Weldon forced to confront the reality of Perley’s homosexuality (and his abject fear of being required to speak French) as he processes a horrific event from their past. After a lifetime of shutting down, a new set of dire circumstances has them opening their ears to hear one another’s stories. Award-winning filmmaker Michael Clowater, a master of wringing humour from pain, never loses sight of Perley and Weldon’s essential humanity among the pratfalls and bigotries, embedding beautiful truths in the film’s engrossing frictions.

CompetitionFeature

SPANISH • ENGLISH ST | Argentinian filmmaker Matías is an intense perfectionist struggling to shape his autobiographical film as the past wriggles from his grip. Is Alexander—a dashing fabulist from Sweden he met in Italy as a boy—the lost love of his life? Or just a lovely, bittersweet dream? At the United World College of the Adriatic, with its diverse, exuberant student body, young Matías (Santiago Madrussan) finds a freedom he never knew in Argentina. There, he is befriended by Alexander (Oscar Morgan), whose rousing stories and bedroom eyes make the world more magical, and whose family’s vast holiday home becomes a memory palace for all that was left unsaid. In his 40s, Matías (co-writer/director Juan Pablo Di Pace) looks back at this time and, with a festival deadline looming, tries to fathom the sizzling closeness and coded interactions. A key piece of evidence lying dormant for when he least expects it. With its meta intrigues and captivating sweep, Duino is an elegiac masterwork crackling with swoon-worthy chemistry. A film that asks: how far are we willing to go for a proper conclusion, and what, in the end, remains voices in the wind?

CompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

DUTCH • FRENCH ST | Capturing the recklessness of youth and the excitement of newfound sexual liberties in sensuous black-and-white cinematography, Dennis Alink’s Out offers up a vivid and tender tale of being young and gay. Tom (Bas Keizer, in a star-making performance) and Ajani (an effervescent Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are closeted secondary school sweethearts who yearn for life outside of their small-minded, rural community in the Netherlands. Their solution is Amsterdam, where the queer scene is thriving and they can work at their dreams of becoming filmmakers. Quickly falling into the Dutch capital’s gay nightlife offers the pair some initial thrills: cheeky games of Never Have I Ever, limo rides across the city, eye-opening trips to the bathhouse. But the challenges quickly follow, pushing them to separately question: “Who am I, and where do I fit in?” Recalling such classic monochromatic films about wayward youth as The Last Picture Show and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Alink and his queer collaborators present a lived-in, piercing portrait that proves coming out isn’t just a pronouncement of one’s sexuality, it’s a simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery.

Short

A weekend at a music festival is brought to a grinding halt when Tai is confronted by a white person wearing a Native Ceremonial Headdress. He retreats into his mind where a roundtable of various versions of his identity meets to come up with the perfect thing to say.

CompetitionDocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

The work of Two-Spirit, nêhiyaw (Cree) artist George Littlechild took the reality of residential schools head-on decades before it would enter the collective Canadian conscience. A Sixties Scoop survivor, Littlechild uses his “whimsical,” improvised technique to unlock colourful exuberance and long-held trauma. Conor McNally, a Métis filmmaker, honours his journey. Littlechild was given his great grandfather’s name, nanekawâsis, at a Powwow in 2001. Both Littlechild and the eponymously named film embody its meaning: “swift child.” As we pay witness to a childhood shuffled between foster homes and Littlechild’s emergence as a fleet-fingered artist, the documentary makes fluid connections between past and present. Archival footage blends with warmly tinted 16mm interviews of 65-year-old Littlechild, still evolving in his practice, still passing on his deeply felt knowledge of his ancestry and “Rainbow” spirit. Whereas his partner, John Powell, uses art to govern his freewheeling tendencies, Littlechild harnesses paint to break free of his circumscribed daily life, healing himself and his audience through enlightened transcendence. nanekawâsis begins and ends with a sky full of colour, beautifully eliding time, revealing how light and dark, expectancy and reflection are all indispensable parts of life’s circle.

Made au CanadaShort

A middle aged trans man transitions at 44 and observes his changes over a year and nine months, with a looming ongoing news cycle of anti-trans legislation.