Sin La Habana is a film about destiny, power dynamics, and prophecy through the eyes of its three main characters. Leonardo (Yonah Acosta) and Sara (Evelyn O’Farrill), a young Afro-Cuban couple, are desperate to leave the island.
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The year 2021 marks the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. To commemorate the historical occasion, director Rodrigo Reyes offers a poignant hybrid-cinema experience to explore the brutal legacy of colonialism in contemporary Mexico.
Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador (played by newcomer Eduardo San Juan Breña), Reyes recreates Hernán Cortez’s epic journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City. As this fictional character is forced to interact with real victims and subjects of Mexico’s failed drug wars, Reyes portrays the country’s current humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious and unfinished colonial project, still in motion, nearly five-hundred years later.
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Those of us in Toronto can finally enjoy live/musical theatre again! The new Canadian musical BLACKOUT opens at High Park Amphitheatre as part of Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park 2021 programming this week. The Musical Stage Company (MSC) has supported the development of this in-development production over the past year.
BLACKOUT is set on the evening of the blackout of 2003 and while this happened nearly 20 years ago, a musical about how Torontonians came together and found connection in the dark feels quite relevant today when the city is slowly coming out of the darkness of the pandemic and trying to reconnect.
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As most of us have learned to cope with uncertainty, one Toronto family offers a new perspective on adversity and joy, as captured by Jamaican-French Canadian filmmaker Maya Annik Bedward.
Why We Fight spotlights the life of Gerdson (aka Sapo) and Lorena, raising their son Nauê who was born with a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder. The family finds strength, community, and comfort in Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial arts practice, brought from their birth country to Toronto.
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Toronto-based writer and filmmaker, Ann Shin, released her first fiction novel The Last Exiles earlier this Spring.
The novel is about a young North Korean couple whose love is put to the ultimate test when they are forced to flee their country. It is a story about love, family and the price of freedom as Suja and Jin end up deep in the heart of the Chinese underground. As they get separated, Suja’s true mettle shines through in her heroic fight for freedom.
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Canadian writer and filmmaker Sheona McDonald premiered two films at this year’s Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival.
One, a short documentary film Into Light, which captures a season of change as a mother and child navigate the complexities of gender identity together. The other, a feature documentary Dead Man’s Switch: a crypto mystery, a cautionary tale, about the short life & mysterious death of QuadrigaCX CEO, Gerald Cotten.
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Apenas el Sol (Nothing but the Sun) had its North American premiere at Hot Docs this week; it is Arami Ullón‘s second feature documentary. The film ties into the growing plight of Indigenous people everywhere who are working towards the conservation of their language and culture
Facing the consequences of a violent uprooting, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has been recording stories, songs, and testimonies of his Ayoreo people since the seventies.
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This year’s Hot Docs opened with Ann Shin‘s thought- provoking documentary A.rtificial I.mmortality.
The film posits the question, If you could create an immortal version of yourself, would you? Drawing inspiration from her own life and her father’s memory loss, Shin speaks with experts in the field who suggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enable us to live forever and foresee a “post-biological” world where humans and AI merge.
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Director, art director, animator, and script writer of animated films Bára Anna Stejskalová has a specialization on stop-motion animated films.
In her latest film Love Is Just a Death Away (Jsme si o smrt blíž), love comes to worms in an animated short from the Czech Republic. Brutal and dark, yet whimsical amid the dystopia of its setting. I was truly captivated by this charming story about finding love even amid utter decay.
Stejskalová was gracious enough to take part in my 5 Questions With… series after the film’s premiere at SXSW.
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Andrew Chung‘s first feature, White Elephant, offers a fresh perspective based on many 1990s high school rom-coms.
Set in 1996, in a majority-minority neighbourhood in Scarborough, 16-year-old Pooja (Zaarin Bushra) finds herself torn between her crush on Trevor, a white boy (Jesse Nasmith), and her friends Manpreet (Gurleen Singh) and Amit (Dulmika Hapuarachchi).
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