The CaribbeanTales International Film Festival is an annual film festival, staged in Toronto, Ontario. [1] The festival programs a lineup of films from Caribbean countries, as well as films from the Caribbean diaspora in Canada.
The festival was launched in 2006 by filmmaker Frances-Anne Solomon, through her CaribbeanTales Media Group production firm. [2] In 2009, the festival also launched a separate sister event for youth films, staged during Black History Month. [3] In 2013, it launched CaribbeanTales TV, a video on demand streaming service dedicated to Caribbean films. [4]
The event is normally staged at Toronto's Royal Cinema. [5] Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, the 2020 festival was staged online through CaribbeanTales TV. [4]
The festival also sponsors an incubator program to fund film projects by emerging filmmakers within the Caribbean diaspora. [6]
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 festivals focus on a specific filmmaker, genre of film, or 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.
The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a permanent destination for film culture operating out of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, located in Downtown Toronto. TIFF's mission is "to transform the way people see the world through film".
The Toronto Caribbean Carnival, formerly known as Caribana, is a festival of Caribbean culture and traditions held each summer in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a pan-Caribbean Carnival event and has been billed as North America's largest street festival, frequented by over 1.3 million visitors each year for the festival's final parade and an overall attendance of 2 million.
The Inside Out Film and Video Festival, also known as the Inside Out LGBT or LGBTQ Film Festival, is an annual Canadian film festival, which presents a program of LGBT-related film. The festival is staged in both Toronto and Ottawa. Founded in 1991, the festival is now the largest of its kind in Canada. Deadline dubbed it "Canada’s foremost LGBTQ film festival."
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.
Toronto After Dark Film Festival is a showcase of horror, sci-fi, action and cult cinema held annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The festival premieres a diverse selection of feature-length and short-films from around the world including new works from Asia, Europe and North America.
Frances-Anne Solomon is an English-Caribbean-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She has lived in Britain, Barbados and Toronto, Canada.
A Winter Tale is a 2007 Canadian drama film written, directed and produced by Frances-Anne Solomon, featuring Canadian actor Peter Williams and Caribbean stars Leonie Forbes and Dennis "Sprangalang" Hall. It premiered at the ReelWorld Film Festival where it won Solomon the Outstanding Canadian Feature Film Award, as well as Special Mention in the Outstanding Screenplay category. It subsequently screened at the Montreal World Film Festival, Atlantic Film Festival, Bite The Mango Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival & The New York African Diaspora Film Festival.
The Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival (formerly the Fairy Tales International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival) is an annual event held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Since its founding in 1999, the festival has attracted over 35,000 attendees. It is currently the longest running LGBT film festival in Alberta.
Lisa Wickham is a media producer-director-TV personality in Trinidad and Tobago. She began her television career at the age of six on the weekly Rikki Tikki Children's Show, a live programme on the only national TV station in Trinidad and Tobago at the time, Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). Lisa literally grew up on national television, eventually hosting shows such as the daily morning prime-time news and talk show T&T This Morning, the daily mid-morning talk show Community Dateline and the iconic teen talent show Party Time. In 2005, the government of Trinidad and Tobago closed TTT and in 2006 re-opened the station under the name Caribbean New Media Group (CNMG). CNMG was then closed in 2018.
The Trinidad and Tobago film festival (ttff) is a film festival in the Anglophone Caribbean. It takes place annually in Trinidad and Tobago in the latter half of September, and runs for approximately two weeks. The festival screens feature-length narrative and documentary films, as well as short and experimental films.
The National Screen Institute - Canada is a non-profit organization headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The organization describes itself as "Serving content creators across Canada to tell unforgettable stories through industry-informed training and mentoring."
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.
The Toronto Black Film Festival is an annual film festival in Toronto, Ontario. Held in February each year as part of Black History Month, the festival programs a selection of African, Caribbean, African American and Black Canadian films.
The Toronto Queer Film Festival is an LGBT film festival held annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Launched in 2016 by a collective of artists and activists who perceived the programming of the city's established Inside Out Film and Video Festival to be too mainstream and commercialized, the event stages a program of independent feature and short films and videos over several days in the fall of each year, focusing primarily on works created from an alternative or activist perspective.
The 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, the 45th event in the Toronto International Film Festival series, was held from September 10 to 21, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, the festival took place primarily on an online streaming platform, although limited in-person screenings still took place within the constraints of social distancing restrictions.
The Montreal International Black Film Festival is an annual film festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Held in September each year, the festival programs a selection of African, Caribbean, African American and Black Canadian films.
The 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the 46th event in the Toronto International Film Festival series, was held from September 9 to 18, 2021. Due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, the festival was staged as a "hybrid" of in-person and digital screenings. Most films were screened both in-person and on the digital platform, although a few titles were withheld by their distributors from the digital platform and instead were screened exclusively in-person.