A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon the festival's focus, can include international and domestic releases. Some film festivals focus on a specific filmmaker, genre of film, or on a subject matter. Several film festivals focus solely on presenting short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians, including Jerry Beck, do not consider film festivals as official releases of the film.
Evan Beloff is a Canadian film writer, producer, director and production company executive.
Sami Mermer is a Turkish Canadian documentary filmmaker of Kurdish descent.
Antoine is a 2008 Canadian documentary film directed by Laura Bari. The film features a 5-year old blind boy named Antoine Houang, living in Montreal, Quebec. It tells the real and imaginary life of Antoine, a boy detective who runs, drives, makes decisions, hosts radio shows and adores simultaneous telephone conversations. Over the course of two years, he uses a mini-boom microphone to discover and capture the sounds surrounding him. In this manner he also co-created the soundtrack of the film.
The Montreal International Documentary Festival is a Canadian documentary film festival, staged annually in Montreal, Quebec.
Magnus Isacsson was a Canadian documentary filmmaker whose films investigated contemporary political issues and topics in social activism.
Nicolás Pereda is a Mexican-Canadian film director. To date, he has directed nine features and three short films.
Highrise is a multi-year, multimedia documentary project about life in residential highrises, directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The project, which began in 2009, includes five web documentaries—The Thousandth Tower, Out My Window, One Millionth Tower, A Short History of the Highrise and Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise—as well as more than 20 derivative projects such as public art exhibits and live performances.
American Vagabond is a 2013 Finnish documentary film directed by Susanna Helke.
Arnait Video Productions is a women's filmmaking collective that aims to value the voices of Inuit women in debates of interest to all Canadians. Arnait is related to Isuma Productions.
Sol is a 2014 Canadian documentary film by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Susan Avingaq about Solomon Uyarasuk, a musician/circus performer who died in police custody in Igloolik, Nunavut. The film questions the claims by the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment that Uyarasuk hanged himself in his cell, and also explores the wider issue of Nunavut's very high suicide rate.
Derby Crazy Love is a Canadian documentary film directed by Maya Gallus and Justine Pimlott of Red Queen Productions, and distributed by Women Make Movies. The film explores flat track roller derby, and its third-wave feminist empowerment. It was initially released on November 14, 2013, at the Montreal International Documentary Festival.
Philippe Lesage is a Canadian film director and screenwriter from Quebec. Originally a documentary filmmaker, he moved into narrative feature filmmaking in the 2010s with the films Copenhague: A Love Story, The Demons and Genesis (Genèse).
Angry Inuk is a 2016 Canadian Inuit-themed feature-length documentary film written and directed by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril that defends the Inuit seal hunt, as the hunt is a vital means for Inuit to sustain themselves. Subjects in Angry Inuk include Arnaquq-Baril herself as well as Aaju Peter, an Inuit seal hunt advocate, lawyer and seal fur clothing designer who depends on the sealskins for her livelihood. Partially shot in the filmmaker's home community of Iqaluit, as well as Kimmirut and Pangnirtung, where seal hunting is essential for survival, the film follows Peter and other Inuit to Europe in an effort to have the EU Ban on Seal Products overturned. The film also criticizes NGOs such as Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare for ignoring the needs of vulnerable northern communities who depend on hunt for their livelihoods by drawing a false distinction between subsistence-driven Inuit hunters and profit-driven commercial hunters.
Gulîstan, Land of Roses is a 2016 feature-length documentary film about women guerillas in a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Free Women's Unit, in combat against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, directed by Kurdish Montreal filmmaker Zaynê Akyol. Shot in Iraqi Kurdistan, the film is co-produced Montreal's Périphéria Productions, Germany's MitosFilm and the National Film Board of Canada.
Sexe de rue is a 2003 Canadian documentary film about the history and current conditions of street prostitutes in the Centre-Sud of Montréal, written, directed and co-produced by Richard Boutet, who died of a heart attack on 29 August 2003, a few days before the film's premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival. The largely first person documentary gives a voice to street workers, allowing them to tell their own stories in their own words. Prostitution is discussed as labour and in the context of local history and relevant sociological factors, including dangers.
Jeremiah Hayes is a Canadian film director, writer and editor. He is most noted as co-director, co-writer and the editor of the film Reel Injun, for which he won the Gemini Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Program at the 25th Gemini Awards in 2010. Hayes is also recognized for his work editing Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, for which he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Editing in a Documentary at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018. Reel Injun won a Peabody Award for Best Electronic Media in 2011 and Rumble won the Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. In 2020, Rumble received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. In 2021, Reel Injun is featured in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures core exhibition of the Stories of Cinema.
Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth is a feature-length documentary film on the indigenous Maya in Mexico and Guatemala and their opposition to gold mining in their nation.
Dear Jackie is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Henri Pardo and released in 2021. Conceived as a love letter to Jackie Robinson, the film explores the way the city of Montreal used its embrace of Robinson, when he played for the Montreal Royals in the 1940s, to construct a mythical image of itself as a post-racial city that had moved beyond anti-black racism, even while Black residents of the city's Little Burgundy neighbourhood were still suffering profound effects of racism in reality.
My Real Life is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Magnus Isacsson and released in 2012. The last film Isacsson completed before his death, the film centres on the experiences of four young men in suburban Montréal-Nord who have turned to hip hop music as a creative outlet.
