2024Festival

2024 Regent Park Film Festival

Shorts - Homemaking: in our bodies and our lands

Nov 30 2:00 pm to 3:40 pm
RSVP

Location: Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum | 585 Dundas Street East

 

The works in this program explore the deep connections between Indigeneity, homemaking, and our relationships with the land and each other. These shorts offer narratives that centre the work of homemaking, reclaiming traditions, nurturing relationships with one another and the land, as well as sustaining cultural heritage and protecting ancestral histories for future generations.

Tailor Made

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: In Vietnamese & English with English subtitles
  • Length: 12 m
  • Watch Trailer

TAILOR MADE follows the life and work of Tam Nguyen, a refugee from Vietnam who came to Canada in the ‘80s as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and used his masterful tailoring skills to craft a new life for himself. Celebrating 43 years since his arrival in Canada, TAILOR MADE captures Tam’s reflections on his life’s journey and his promise to dedicate his life to helping others.

Directed by

Quan Luong is a Vietnamese filmmaker based in Winnipeg, Canada. His films have been screened at the DOC NYC, Reel World Film Festival, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, and many more. His recent work includes the CBC Gem docu-series FINDING DIAMONDS and the short documentary I HURT MYSELF.

Mawtini (My Homeland)

  • Year: 2023
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: In English and Arabic with English subtitles
  • Length: 19 m
  • Advisory: Coarse language
  • Watch Trailer

Grieving the loss of her grandmother, Nawal fixates on keeping a fig sapling alive, her last remaining connection to Palestine. When she meets Tanya, an older Indigenous woman and the resident trouble-maker in her new apartment building, she learns what connection to the land under colonialism and capitalism really means.

Directed by

Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller is a mixed-race Palestinian filmmaker whose work explores fragmented identity, grief & post-traumatic growth through “oh no, should I laugh?” comedy. Fateema is a WIDC and CFC Directors’ Lab alumni and recently completed a fellowship for Middle Eastern writers at USC. She is a firm believer in resistance through laughter.

Director will be in attendance

we would be freer

  • Year: 2023
  • Genre: Experimental Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: In English and Arabic with English subtitles
  • Length: 9 m

WE WOULD BE FREER (بنكون اكتر احرار) is a short film reflecting on the relationship between native plants and peoples living under settler-colonialism through an exploration of the sumac plant. Weaving between the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, WE WOULD BE FREER invites viewers to contemplate the role of the sumac plant in two occupied lands that lie far apart.

CANADIAN PREMIERE

Directed by

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist currently based on Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her work often looks at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework and using memory and story to intimately engage with audiences Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and is based between occupied Ramallah and Ottawa on unceded Anishinaabe territory.

Custard

  • Year: 2023
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 7 m

In this experimental micro-documentary, five Toronto-based artists gather for a shared meal, reflecting on the sacredness of non-conformity, inner child healing, platonic intimacy, and queer kinship.

Directed by

Sania Khan (b. 1994, Pakistan) is a queer, multi-disciplinary futurist, filmmaker, creative technologist, researcher and somatic facilitator. Sania’s art-alchemy practice engages the technologies of story, soma, and spirit to forge liberated futures where we live in right relationship with(in) ourselves, each other, the natural worlds, and unseen worlds.

Atmospheric Arrivals

  • Year: 2023
  • Genre: Experimental
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 6 m
  • Watch Trailer

Atmospheric Arrivals’ is a living multimedia archival project and polytemporal memory bank about home and the (im)possibility of return. The film captures the “atmospheric arrival,” a means of coming into being through memory and imagination.

Directed by

Ayo Tsalithaba is a visual artist, writer, researcher and award-winning filmmaker, from Ghana and Lesotho and based in Toronto.

Their primary mediums include film, photography and illustration. Their work explores questions of home, (in)visibility, liminality and (un)belonging as they relate to Black queer and trans* African diasporic subjectivity.

Director will be in attendance

Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black)

  • Year: 2022
  • Genre: Docufiction
  • Country: Australia
  • Language: In Yankunytjatjara with English subtitles
  • Length: 25 m
  • Advisory: Scenes of violence, depictions of homophobia and transphobia, depictions of suicide
  • Watch Trailer

MARUNGKA TJALATJUNU (DIPPED IN BLACK) follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch’s journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide back to his remote Anangu Community of Aputula in order to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical; it is how Anangu Tjukurpa (stories connected to country, dreaming, myth, and lore) have been passed down from generation to generation for over 60,000+ years.

Directed by

Matthew Thorne (b. 1993, Adelaide) is a South Australian filmmaker and artist whose work uses film, photography, and re-enactment to explore contemporary ‘Australian’ identity, spirituality, relationship to land, and masculinity. Matthew recently contributed photography to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ album GHOSTEEN (2019), Justin Kurzel’s TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2019), and Ridley Scott’s ALIEN: COVENANT (2017) and currently lives between Athens, Greece and Adelaide, Australia.

Derik Lynch (b. 1986, Alice Springs) is an initiated Yankunytjatjara man. He is a performer, filmmaker, and artist who grew up between Alice Springs and remote Communities in the Northern Territory and South Australia. He has worked both nationally and internationally in theatre, film and TV including performances at the Sydney Opera House (AUS) and Southbank Theatre (UK).

Speakers and panelists

Director

Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller is a mixed-race Palestinian filmmaker whose work explores fragmented identity, grief & post-traumatic growth through a “Oh no, should I laugh?” style of comedy. Fateema is a WIDC and CFC Directors’ Lab alumni and recently completed a fellowship for Middle Eastern writers at USC. She is a firm believer in resistance through laughter.

Director

Ayo Tsalithaba is a visual artist, writer, researcher and award-winning filmmaker, from Ghana and Lesotho and based in Toronto. Their primary mediums include film, photography and illustration. Their work explores questions of home, (in)visibility, liminality and (un)belonging as they relate to Black queer and trans* African diasporic subjectivity.

RSVP

Thank you to our Co-presenters and Community Partners!

Co-presenters