Making waves across the festival circuit, Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon is the debut feature documentary from director Ernie Bustamante. An Emmy-nominated television writer turned indie filmmaker, Bustamante centres his work on Latino/a characters, drawing from his own roots in the Arizona desert. The film offers a way overdue film portrait of Sonia Manzano, known to millions as “Maria” from Sesame Street.
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Premiering at TIFF 2025’s Discovery Programme, Little Lorraine (2025) is a strong debut from director Andy Hines. Based on a true story and Adam Baldwin’s song “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine,” the film is set within a very distinct Canadian landscape, geographically and emotionally.
Experienced through the eyes of three best friends (Stephen Amell, Joshua Close, Steve Lund), Little Lorraine tells the true tale of how this unlikely story was born, prospered and imploded over a season in the life of this township.
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There’s a version of A Tribe Called Love that feels familiar; two young people falling for each other despite the rules that say they should not. This is a story we have seen before, à la Romeo & Juliet, this story is shaped by love, resistance, and the weight of community.
Mohamed Ahmed’s debut feature starts as a recognizable setup which gradually reveals something layered, specific, and with emotional honesty about what it means to love within, and against, the rules you are raised within.
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Inspired by Thomas’ celebrated short film Redlights, Nika & Madison follows two Indigenous women whose lives are thrown into chaos after a violent encounter with police.
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Set in the vibrant Métis community of Wapamon Sipi, Blood Lines weaves together personal pain with cultural pride in a narrative that feels both intimately personal and universally human.
The sophomore feature from Métis writer-director Gail Maurice, the film is a deeply emotional exploration of identity, family, and cultural belonging.
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What begins as activism quickly quickly escalates as three conservatives join a widening conflict over identity, power, and the future of politics in the United States of America.
Homegrown brings raw intimacy and unprecedented access to a political moment still unfolding. The documentary reveals the lived experiences of people whose determination to turn their beliefs into action places them on the front lines of the USA’s political divide.
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We Bury the Dead, written and directed by Zak Hilditch, first presents as a zombie thriller, but it unfolds into something quieter and more introspective.
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The Voice of Hind Rajab is a film that asks us to listen; not passively, not briefly, but with direct attention. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the film centres on the final emergency call of six-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under fire in Gaza on January 29, 2024. Built from real emergency recordings and thoughtful dramatization, the film creates space for a voice that the world heard, and then failed to answer.
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In There Are No Words, filmmaker Min Sook Lee turns inward to confront and explore silence, memory, and grief across continents in a poetic meditation on personal and communal loss and family legacy.
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Finch and Midland is an intersection in Scarborough. Like other intersections in the suburbs of Canada’s largest city, this intersection also has many a story to tell. In Finch & Midland, writer/director Timothy Yeung focuses on four stories from the wave of Hong Kong immigrants who came to Canada in the 1990s hoping for a new life.
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