Canada Council for the Arts

Over the years, a child's romantic ideals about death blossom into necrophilia, the study of embalming and the most profound relationship of her life.

An emotionally constrained view of the displacement of human feelings in our video saturated society. Van regularly visits his grandmother in a run-down nursing home. His father depends on phone sex for guidance meanwhile erasing family homevideos of happier times with homemade pornography. Will Van rescue his grandmother and memories of his mother in time?

Four young office workers have a bet going to see who can last the longest without going outside. In the maze that is the downtown core of a large city, glass skywalks connect apartment buildings, office towers and shopping malls. Its day 28 of the bet and over the lunch hour, as the office prepares for the company founder's retirement party, things start to seriously unravel.

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

This unique narrative incorporating documentary elements follows Rey, a 40-year-old non-binary teacher and typhoon survivor, on a roadtrip to fame. With surreal comedy and social portrait realism, filmmaker Seán‌ Devlin explores climate change, LGBTQ+ issues, and the impact of colonialism on contemporary Philippines.

A portrait of a Vietnamese-Canadian family opening up a restaurant and cocktail bar in Calgary's Chinatown, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The mountain-village passions of a German widow and her sons unfold in the style of a 1920s expressionist movie.

Sofia yearns to sing with the heartbreak voice of the ranchera singers she admires. One day, she receives an unexpected invitation to visit the mysterious "Paloma Negra" bar. There, she is shocked to see her favourite singer, Pieta, who had all but disappeared at the height of her career, singing to the sad souls in the bar. Sofia gathers her courage to sing for Pieta, only to be told that her voice is devoid of the suffering and heartbreak necessary to sing the songs. Determined to fill her voice with the necessary pain, she learns a hard, but valuable lesson about the reality of heartbreak.

This short film is an ode to the women who settled the Prairies, from the days of early immigration to 1916 - when Manitobans became the first women in Canada to receive the provincial vote - and beyond. Recollections of women are complemented by a series of quotations drawn from letters, diaries, and newspapers of the day, which are spoken over re-enacted scenes and archival photographs.

Ratgirl, a diffident 19 year-old woman, as she and her older roommate Alice discover their apartment is infested with rats — a claim which is adamantly ignored by their miserly landlord. Over the course of a hellish fourty-eight hours, Ratgirl unconfidently navigates sexual harassment, housing instability, ex-friendships, and suppressed mental illness.

A story about an aging crime family patriarch.

Inspired by the early trash films of John Waters, the film stars Estdelacropolis as Demira, a gay porn actor struggling with both his emotionally complicated relationship with his mother Esther and his desire to break out of porn and into mainstream movies. He connects with a Freudian psychiatrist who is convinced that his homosexuality stems from an unresolved Oedipus complex which he has repressed by denying his natural attractions to women, to which the psychiatrist's proposed solution is to hypnotize Esther into believing that she is a man so that men will become the gender that sexually repulses Demira; in his career, he is ambivalent when the first "mainstream" role he is able to land is a gore film in which he will play the victim of a cannibal family for which Esther has also been cast as the mother.

A wickedly funny satire about the disparity between a woman's natural beauty and the ideal promoted by the mega-billion dollar advertising industry, this animated film shows us how far we will go to change the shape of our bodies to meet the demands of an impossible image. But the picture-perfect exterior can be maintained by our heroine only if she restrains her body's natural spontaneity. YOUR NAME IN CELLULITE visually ponders at what point the body will say "Enough is enough!" and take matters into its own hands.

A recent graduate is urged by an impossibly perfect woman to start digging a hole in a nearby park, setting in motion a chain of events that threaten her emotional balance and carefully maintained routines.

Centres on Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, who in later years lived on skid row in Montreal following a history of drug and alcohol abuse.

An international team of art restorers and archaeologists begin work on the restoration of medieval frescoes inside a network of ancient caves. Faced with local bureaucratic challenges and systemic neglect of archaeological sites, the team encounters a community of shepherds and migrants that have used the caves for centuries and discover a living culture worth preserving most of all.

A short documentary following Koyote Moone and her medical and psychiatric service dog Banner. This film explores issues surrounding non-visible disabilities and discrimination against service dog teams.

A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke follows a big boned butch into skirmishes, drag, and the arms of a beautiful recruit. The public and private lives of this "strange animal" are explored with the reverence and glee found in the educational exposés like Reefer Madness and bad-boy films like Rebel without a Cause. However, because this fictionalized lesbian history is a first-person narrative, it is filled with all the joy, pain, and ambivalence each of us experiences while negotiating a marginalized identity.

Fleeing to Tokyo with the hopes that she can fulfil her dream of becoming a dancer, Yume is met with the harsh reality that success isn’t something that comes quickly or easily. Whilst juggling her job as a hostess in Tokyo’s red-light district, Yume throws herself headfirst into studying the artform and integrating herself into the underground dance community.