2025Festival

2025 Regent Park Film Festival

Shorts - Between Rituals and Return

Nov 29 12:00 pm to 1:50 pm
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Location: Central YMCA | 20 Grosvenor Street

Between Rituals and Return reflects on the role of spirituality, land, and memory in shaping our understanding of the self in our current world. Through recitation, prayer, and dreams, these films underscore the persistence of faith as both labour and salve. From Sudan to Palestine or Burma to Toronto, these stories emphasize the roles of faith, grief, and belonging as well as the power of resistance and remembrance in our search for meaning in the wake of loss, conflict, and displacement.

your land cries for you

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Experimental
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: Harari, English
  • Length: 8m
  • Advisory: Explores thematics of themes of islamophobia, anti-Black racism, and misogyny

Canadian Premiere

Lost in a trance between conversations of the past, old worlds, and alternative realities as she tries to find her place, Marium is called for prayer during her journey home.

Directed by

Niya Ahmed Abdullahi

Niya Ahmed Abdullahi is a multi-disciplinary artist, technologist and the founder of @Habasooda, a collective dedicated to sharing the richness of the Muslim experience. Her work evokes memory, both past, present and future, in connection with diasporic experiences, and ancestral awakenings. Pillars of resistance are drawn through her divine labour of love.

Baq’a The Open Valley

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Docu-Fiction
  • Country: Palestine, Jordan
  • Language: English, Arabic
  • Length: 13m
  • Advisory: Thematics and discussions relating to histories of forced displacement and genocide
  • Watch Trailer

While struggling to understand his place as a second generation Jordanian–born Palestinian, Abood’s uncle shares stories of his youth as a refugee during his expulsion from Palestine in 1967 and his childhood growing up in al-Baq’a Refugee Camp in Jordan.

Directed by

Youssef Mutawe

Hailing from Wînîpek, Manitoba, Youssef Mutawe is a writer, director, and editor currently situated in Tkaronto, Ontario. He creates and assists others with documentary and fiction filmmaking and implements archival practices in the creation of his work.

Director will be in attendance

Is It War?

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Experimental
  • Country: Sudan
  • Language: Arabic
  • Length: 5m
  • Watch Trailer

Toronto Premiere

When Jafar is detached from his soul in a surreal journey through a forest, he must mentally escape the brutal truths of his homeland’s conflict in Sudan — and the horrors of war and displacement — before it destroys his mind.

Directed by

Timeea Mohamed Ahmed

Timeea Mohamed Ahmed is an award-winning Sudanese director, editor and producer working across documentary, experimental films, and digital media. Based in Canada, he is best known for Khartoum (2025), with other notable works includeing Saddari (2023). In addition to film, Timeea is actively engaged in advocacy and commercial media production.

Paradise Heights

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: S’gaw Karen
  • Length: 23m
  • Advisory: Brief scenes and imagery of blood
  • Watch Trailer

Seven-year-old Lah, a narcoleptic girl in Toronto’s co-op housing, discovers an otherworldly bond with her late mother through vivid dreams of the Burmese jungle. As visions blur reality, a cherished family heirloom pulls her between memory, longing, and a realm where the past and present intertwine.

Directed by

Karl Kai & Robert Mentov

Karl Kai is a Hong Kong-born Canadian writer, director, and editor. His films, showcased at FNC (Festival du Nouveau Cinéma) and DOXA, blend naturalism with a surreal, lyrical quality. Working with both actors and non-actors, he crafts immersive, emotionally resonant narratives driven by authenticity and deeply felt performances.

Robert Mentov is a Canadian filmmaker with over a decade of experience in independent cinema. He has studied under Apichatpong Weerasethakul and participated in international film labs with B2B Doc, Tabor, and Sacdoc. Currently, he is involved in the production of several feature films, including the Burmese documentary White Tiger Column.

99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied To Yours

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Experimental
  • Country: USA
  • Language: English, Arabic
  • Length: 11m
  • Watch Trailer

International Premiere

99 Names: My Liberation is Tied to Yours is a portal between the threshold of birth and decay, a point of meditation on the dying paradigm of patriarchy that has plagued the history of Sudan. In the wake of this destruction exists immense grief for what has been lost and, simultaneously, an opening through which we may create something new. Combining sonic rituals of oral storytelling, recitation of the Quran, and solfeggio frequencies, 99 Names shares the kinetic traditions that bind us and invites us to imagine how we can collectively hold, transmute and ultimately release the weight of grief.

Directed by

Marwa Eltahir

Based in Queens, NY, Marwa is invested in storytelling as an act of transformation. Borne from Omdurman, Sudan, Marwa recognizes the power of story-sharing to bequeath valuable ancestral knowledge and technologies. Marwa is the founder of Our Political Home (OPH), an art incubator for trans & queer African storytellers.

Director will be in attendance

How To Bury Your Father

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English, Urdu
  • Length: 10m
  • Advisory: Thematics and scenes of final rites
  • Watch Trailer

A young man returns home and spends the night trying to fulfill his father’s dying wish for a proper burial.

Directed by

Ammar Keshodia

Ammar Keshodia is a Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker and curator based in Toronto. He has worked on the programming teams at TIFF, SXSW, and the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival. His film work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

A Kin Sin

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Experimental, Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English, Hindi
  • Length: 5m
  • Watch Trailer

While oiling a friend’s scalp, filmmaker Gulzar seeks to understand their gender amidst their familial and cultural wishes.

Directed by

Gulzar

Gulzar (they/them) is a Writer and director based in Toronto, Ontario . While working in both the documentary and narrative medium, their films speak from the desire to be witnessed. They continuously explore their transness, the Desi diaspora, themes of lineage and privacy, and above all, love.

Director will be in attendance

Speakers and panelists

Youssef Mutawe Panellist

Marwa Eltahir Panellist

Gulzar Panellist

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Thank you to our Co-presenters and Community Partners!

Co-presenters