Playlist
Evocative animation brings the landscape to life in this experimental exploration of the historic Saint Lawrence River and its famous thousand islands. Fluidly superimposed images mingle with performed dialogue to navigate the boundaries of cinema.
A diver devotes himself to cleaning up the ocean floors in Newfoundland's harbours, one tire at a time. As he edges closer to financial ruin in his effort to save the planet, his good deeds don't go unnoticed.
In an idyllic Philippine fishing village where catches are shared and breathtaking sunsets mark the days, the filmmaker befriends a young boy and captures memories of home during the last days of summer before he must leave for school in the city.
Shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leads this cinematically rich documentary, weaving beautifully realized sequences of traditional stories with the ongoing struggles the Yanomami people face as they fight to preserve the Amazon.
MAU is the first-ever, feature-length documentary about the design visionary Bruce Mau. The film explores his unlikely creative journey and ever-optimistic push to tackle the world's biggest problems with design.
Attempting to reconstruct the lived memory of his people, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has traversed the desolate Paraguayan Chaco for decades to record others of the Ayoreo people, who lived free in the vast forest until colonization forced them from their land and dismantled their culture.
Valerie Taylor is a shark fanatic and an Australian icon – a marine maverick who forged her way as a fearless diver, cinematographer and conservationist. She filmed the real sharks for JAWS and famously wore a chainmail suit, using herself as shark bait, changing our scientific understanding of sharks forever.
To help humanity get to Mars, four scientists, an engineer and an architect agree to embark on the longest space simulation in US history: 366 days in isolation and confinement on an active volcano in Hawaii.
Suffering from an extended drought caused by the climate crisis despite their own tiny carbon footprint, Morocco's Oulad Boukais tribe establishes a school to ensure their children's future, and combats isolation and desertification with optimism, dignity and education.
A powerful man, who is also the former prime minister of Georgia, has developed an exquisite hobby. He collects century old trees along Georgia's coastline. He commissions his men to uproot them and bring them to his private garden. Some of these trees are as tall as 15-floor-buildings.
Facing the twin environmental crises of mass extinction and climate change, counterculture legend Stewart Brand proposes a potential pandora's box for conservation: using biotechnology to resurrect extinct species like the wooly mammoth. It's a crazy idea, but it's not surprising coming from Stewart, a futurist and popularizer of some of the most significant cultural and technological movements of our era, including psychedelics, the modern environmental movement, personal computers, long term thinking, and biotechnology. Stewart's methods are controversial, and his colleagues in the environmental movement believe he is meddling with nature and vow to stand in his way. But we are along for the journey as he travels to Siberia to search for mammoth specimens and explore the resurrection of the Mammoth Steppe in an effort to slow climate change and restore balance to this critical ecosystem.
This timely portrait of 21st century activism follows Commander X, an iconic and divisive figure in the "hacktivist" network who spends his days dodging authorities across North America while surfing the web and surviving the streets.
A filmmaker with mental illness follows three defendants through a specialized mental health probation program. While sharing their rarely seen struggles, she faces her own challenges, making clear just how precarious the ties between people with mental illness, their families and society can be.
Free diver Kiki Bosch takes us on breathtaking journeys into sub-zero waters, from the iceberg fjords of Greenland to the frozen lakes of Finland, pushing the limits of human endurance as she heals from the trauma of sexual assault.
Abandoned after the USSR's fall, denizens of a once-vibrant fishing village in the Caspian Sea turn to poaching to survive. While some faithfully await Putin's promises of Russia's return to greatness, others dream of a more prosperous future beyond the confines of the island's shores.
When 700 helpful Finnish tourists arrive in Benin to assist in a tropical disease vaccine study that could save the lives of millions of children, a unique cultural exchange reveals how humans can help and harm with the best of intentions.
A spiritual journey into the highlands of Harar, immersed in the rituals of khat, a leaf Sufi Muslims chewed for centuries for religious meditations – and Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop today. A tapestry of intimate stories offers a window into the dreams of youth under a repressive regime.
Sundance Film Festival 2021 / Image Courtesy of Sundance Institute
On a journey through the periphery of Addis Ababa, engrossing architectural and landscape images provide the backdrop to a multi-voiced narrative that reveals rapid urbanization, socioeconomic disparity and the seeds of civil war.
If computers could let you live forever, would you? When our minds and memories can be digitized, self-help guru Deepak Chopra and leading robotics engineers envision virtual clones that don't need a body to survive.
Experience a year in the life of a self-taught Japanese ramen master, who considers his legendary noodle shop more than just a livelihood but his life, and his die-hard customers more than just regulars, but true friends.
Dani Karavan, a cocksure Israeli artist in his 80s, sets out on a riotous journey across Europe to say farewell to his deteriorating large-scale environmental sculptures, while also contemplating a decision on the most controversial piece of his career.
Inspired by Florence Nightingale's methods from 150 years ago, a small Danish retirement home deploys a controversial new treatment for dementia patients. With hugs, conversation, eye contact and cake, they shift the focus from pharmaceuticals to care.
When an elderly, seemingly naïve rural painter, who enjoys singing to himself and dancing with animals, is acclaimed as Ukraine's last true folk artist, his work is exhibited in a major show in Kiev. Can fame or a corporate commission compete with the joy he finds in his land and his art?
In February 2020, filmmaker Andrea Segre was locked down in Venice, his late father's hometown. Emptied of all distractions, the city and a grieving son confront the fragilities of their foundations, finding extraordinary beauty in the powerful presence of absence.
Facing a cancer diagnosis, multidisciplinary artist Max Dean asks, "How do we fix ourselves?" Discarded animatronic figures from a decommissioned Ontario Place attraction and wild imagination drive this vivid journey of resilience and creativity in the face of illness.
In this poetic trip around the world, the oyster acts as metaphor for life's passions and frustrations, linking stories of a New York burlesque dancer, French Michelin-starred chefs, a Swedish oyster diver, a Japanese pearl maker and a terminally ill English psychologist.
"A mother wonders, will my children love their perfect machines more than they love me, their imperfect mother? She switches on a smart-crib lulling her crying baby to sleep. This perfect mother is everywhere. She watches over us, takes care of us. We listen to her. We trust her."
An exploration of the shared histories of cameras, weapons, policing and justice. As surveillance technologies become a fixture in everyday life, the film interrogates the complexity of an objective point of view, probing the biases inherent in both human perception and the lens.
Not Available - Sundance Film Festival 2021
When two Chilean gauchos of different generations leave to pursue their cowboy dreams on an Idaho ranch, a humorous and touching tale of clashing cultures unfolds when they must adapt their expectations to the realities of North American agri-business and lifestyles.
In this graceful study of the balance between solitude and community, artist and chef Jim Denevan roams across the US, transforming landscapes into breathtaking, sustainable dining experiences framed by ephemeral installation art.
Three rebellious working-class teenage girls in Bangladesh escape daily hardships and stifling family lives by riding waves on their surfboards, chasing a fleeting and thrilling sense of freedom.
How did the Chinese government turn pandemic cover ups in Wuhan into a triumph for the Communist party?
Not available - Sundance Film Festival 2021 - US Dramatic Competition
A portrait of urban spaces along the Yangtze River in the city of Wuhan. An engaging communal stage on which people perform in various ways: some dancing, singing, swimming; some shoveling, welding and hammering. An evolving landscape that is continuously sculpted by nature and dramatically altered by roaring machines and rising infrastructure.
March 2020, a Wuhan street literally comes to a halt, passers-by stop moving at the sound of a siren. A few moments later, they set off again on their way. Like many others, this city came to a stop this year but has since come back to life. The currents of the Yangtze river, however, have not weakened. The river, which crosses the city and region, runs through and structures the wide static shots of Shengze Zhu's film. The peaceful images leave us time to explore and take our bearings. We follow the bridges to locate where we are, the city is tied up then untied under the filmmaker's patient gaze. Barely changing the shot scale, she builds a landscape film, a river film, to trace back and observe the anatomy of the territory. Wild animals are close by, we guess that an urban hurricane has hit. Construction works dot the vicinity of the Yangtze, a new bridge now straddles it, everything changes. Not its inhabitants. They are still found at the river's edge: walkers, bathers, dancers, workers. The bustle of this imposing city is discreet. On the surface of the shots, letters appear. They talk about recent bereavements due to the Covid epidemic and the inhabitants' pain. Greater forces then come adrift, but even if the river submerges the new roads, it will never cover the memories of the stories attached to its tireless, insurmountable course, and its banks still receive the narratives of those who have passed by. And while the face of Wuhan becomes disfigured, the river bed does not forget.
- Clémence Arrivé
With unprecedented access to Wuhan, China, at the peak of the pandemic lockdown, award-winning director Yung Chang looks beyond statistics and headlines to reveal the emotions and resilience at the core of our shared humanity.
Inhabiting an in-between world where their hearing is both a gift and a curse, children of deaf parents share their struggles and joys and band together against a culture that privileges the spoken word.
This experimental essay resurrects the political imagination of the iconic deaf-blind author Helen Keller, a passionate socialist and disability rights advocate whose radical views, while largely suppressed or sanitized over the years, remain remarkably pertinent today.
As Brazil's COVID-19 death toll soars, President Bolsonaro unleashes a relentless media campaign of misinformation, undermining the efforts of journalists desperate to inform a nation during the darkest months of the pandemic.
Seven young people from across the world were innocently uploading shiny bright 2020 plans when "virus" started trending. Over a year's worth of real-time posts and massive reality checks chart their innocent optimism and surprising resilience to a global change no one saw coming.
In 1910, Roger Casement, British consul in Brazil, investigated atrocities against Indigenous Amazonians, his journals capturing a harrowing picture of their enslavement and murder by the rubber industry. Through his words, their plight is traced all the way to their current struggle for self-determination.
Caught between failed government promises and an occupation by armed militias, coca growers in Colombia confront displacement and mortal threats as they expose the relentless war in their countryside and shatter illusions of a successful peace process.
A young Nenets mother of five navigates life and survival, from the Arctic tundra to the city. Ivanna lives a traditional nomadic life on the tundra, herding reindeer and moving her house on sleds with her children while enduring the extreme cold of the land. Over four years, we follow Ivanna as she strives to support her children and resolves to build a better life for them, an alternative to the harsh existence marked by poverty and dislocation she herself has experienced. Her reindeer herd depleted, Ivanna leaves the tundra, returning the city where the husband she supports has sunk into alcoholism and violence, but where the opportunity to secure housing, a job and schooling for her children is too strong to resist. As she transitions to this new life, Ivanna's determination to serve her family's needs means that her dreams of life on the tundra may be on hold for now, but her connection to the land of her ancestors will never fade.
From delivering food and driving ride shares to tagging images for AI, millions of people around the world are finding work task by task online. The gig economy is worth over 5 trillion USD globally, and growing. And yet the stories of the workers behind this tech revolution have gone largely neglected.
Who are the people in this shadow workforce? THE GIG IS UP brings their stories into the light.
A riveting cryptocurrency thriller unravels the story of a Canadian blockchain wizard who mysteriously died on his honeymoon in India and the fate of his investors' $200 million. Did it vanish into the digital void or does it remain locked away in password-protected accounts?
At the elite level, bridge—the world's most popular card game—has become a million-dollar cut-throat business. When the best competitive player is accused of cheating, the ensuing scandal confounds experts, criminal science, celebrities and basic belief in this hilarious true-crime thriller.
In 1975, Jason Sherman received a tree for his bar mitzvah, planted in Israel in his name. Forty years later, he decides to look for that tree and along the way discovers many uncomfortable truths stemming from his gift.
Renowned French novelist Marguerite Duras's tale of the demise of thousands of antelopes uses powerful imagery that's drawn on by filmmaker Maxime Martinot to make a statement about the nature of surveillance in today's world. A superbly crafted and visually arresting treatise on herd mentality, surveillance and freedom.
A mother studying abroad communicates with her three-year-old through daily video chats. Composed entirely of shared screen time, this long-distance message of love and longing couldn't be more relatable than right now. A window into separation, digital nativism and technology, this hits home: no amount of touching the virtual void can ever approximate real human contact.
With a textural, meditative aesthetic, the Library and Archives of Canada's National Preservation Centre comes alive as a space presenting a symphony of relationships between human and object, embodying the past and predicaments for the future as archival technologies become ever more obsolete.
Originally intending to research California wildfires for a horror film, Quinn Else's interest was piqued and his focus shifted to creating a documentary record when he noticed spectators of all stripes observing the forces of nature's wrath.
Based on audiovisual archives from the National Center for Space Studies (CNES), Listen to the Beat of our Images, is a film by Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste which deals with the establishment of the Guyanese Space Center (Kourou, French Guiana), wishing to bring out the Guyanese population, a real out-of-frame of this space adventure. Combining field investigation and video-editing processes on archives, the film is a fictional documentary around a narrator, representative of a generation of Guianese who experienced as a spectator the transformation of their territory.
Surprising links between borescopic imagery of an underground Cold War–era bunker and human laparoscopic footage lead this investigation of distance and death to hidden new depths, as a surgeon father in Ecuador and filmmaker son in Belgium connect during COVID-19. Empty cavities, inside the body and under the city, leave space to understand what matters most in life: time.
On International Dawn Chorus Day, birds from around the world zoom in to gossip about dating, the weather and, of course, cats. They also discuss serious matters, including the recent deaths of two Egyptian activists: the filmmaker Shady Habash and the queer activist Sarah Hegazi.
This visual trance follows the daily odyssey of men who toil under the sun at the Port of Masusa, relocating resources from the Amazonian jungle to the mainland without the help of wheels or cranes.
A daughter gives voice to the aching physical and psychological toll experienced by two hotel cleaners who work in silence, track time and wear exhaustion in ways that are rarely seen or heard. Their bodies communicate the conditions of their labour, reflecting the rhythm, precision, strength and beauty of everyone who must work to survive.
She-wolf Naya, monitored on her journey from her birthplace in Germany through the Netherlands to Belgium, becomes more and more famous and visible – until it endangers not just her wildness, but her existence.
"Roses are red, violets are blue, if you are a woman, I blame my problems on you." A member of the incel community, angry and vindictive user LonerWolf58 is reported for posting violent, terrorist videos. An algorithm, represented by a haunting wireframe death mask, investigates his misogynist missives, but what lives on the internet proves hard to kill.
What can clone itself, never grows old or dies, is neither plant nor animal, has no mouth or soul, and defies all human classification and understanding? It's the freshwater polyp known as Hydra! Using beguiling microscopic images and a twitchy electronic score, we get closer than ever to the only living thing that is eternal.
Three fearless community organizers with a history of standing up against big tech corporations, embark on an uphill political fight to regulate Uber and Lyft in Toronto so that these companies operate in the public interest, respecting communities, drivers and passengers.
Gen-Z 3D artist Scum Boy, a visionary South African, Jewish trans man living his life with illuminating fearlessness, applies his perspective to making art, good-looking food and the future of humanity in this propulsive scrapbook-cum-manifesto. Doused in glitter and dripping in testosterone, Scum Boy is all about realizing the impossible using software superpowers.
In the markets of Shenzhen, artists produce reproductions from the western artistic canon; however, disruption is in the air. What constitutes art and the way we relate to it are in flux. This pointed documentary explores the nexus of changing taste, morphing artistic practice and emerging technologies.
Snowy, a pet turtle, has spent a decade relegated to a dark corner of a basement. When his happiness and well-being are called into question, his owner valiantly tries to improve the reptile's situation with mixed results.
Hoping to increase their struggling farm's income, the filmmaker's family adopts a side hustle—selling videos of daily farm life on a stock footage website. But the family, accustomed to working for themselves, chafes at having to overcome camera-shyness, surrender their image rights and abide by someone else's terms and conditions. Is autonomy ever worth giving away, regardless of pay?
Crops are the basis of our diet. Good harvests are therefore crucial to the survival of us all. In order for a rich harvest to grow, plants must flower at the right time. But how does a plant know when it should bloom? Only those who understand these mechanisms in plants can get involved in the development of crops and adapt them, for example, to new climatic conditions.
A filmmaker seeking a deeper understanding of her autistic brother dives headlong into his world. A sublime sensory immersion into systems of knowledge typically dismissed and disparaged, Baptiste reveals himself to his sister on his own terms, using his own tools—a magnifying glass as a mirror, a wolf as an empath and a clairvoyant as an expert.