2025Festival

2025 Regent Park Film Festival

Shorts - Tender Points

Nov 29 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
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Location: Central YMCA | 20 Grosvenor Street

This program of short films explores the fluid, often tender, and sometimes complicated, process of becoming or defining oneself, both in the wake of our own histories as well as the expectations of the outside world. These films reflect on the shifting terrain of being and identity—how we change, what we hold onto, and how our relations with others come to shape how we see ourselves. This constellation of stories witnesses the ways in which we work to, hopefully, find our way back to ourselves.

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 14m
  • Watch Trailer

8 Times follows Muhammed, a 39-year-old man at a crossroads after six failed marriages. As he enters his seventh and eighth attempts at matrimony, he begins to reflect on the choices and circumstances that shaped his journey, questioning love, commitment, and the patterns of his past.

Directed by

Adam Mbowe

Adam Mbowe is a filmmaker and video artist who has dedicated herself to exploring the boundaries of visual storytelling. Adam has completed a master’s degree in Cinematic Arts at Concordia University and her installation and short film work has been shown at Images Festival, Festival Filminstes, Regent Park Film Festival, FOFA gallery, and more.

Mùa Xuân Của Mẹ | Mother’s Spring

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: Vietnamese
  • Length: 11m

Toronto Premiere

As Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) approaches, a young Vietnamese immigrant grapples between cultural expectations and their desire to explore a masculine identity, especially when pressured by their mother to wear a feminine áo dài.

Directed by

Trâm Anh Nguyễn

Trâm Anh Nguyễn is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vietnam and Canada who works in film and photography. His work blends documentation and storytelling with a softened gaze, exploring tenderness, resilience, and memory while reflecting on the politics of gender, culture, and his queer-trans identity in relation to his Vietnamese roots.

Director will be in attendance

If We Met Now

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 9m

If We Met Now dissects relationships, sexuality and gender through the lens of a transgender man, who confronts his cisgender boyfriend’s disapproval of a gender affirming procedure.

Directed by

Halen King

Halen King is an Afro-Guyanese Korean writer/filmmaker. He focuses on developing stories that uplift Black and QIBPOC voices and is determined to show the next queer, POC small town kid people on screen they can relate to both inside and out. He currently works as a casting director.

Stubble

  • Year: 2024
  • Genre: Experimental, Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 13m
  • Advisory: Brief scenes of nudity, sexual paraphernalia, and blood

Stubble is an experimental documentary that merges fantasy and reality. A playful exploration of softness, roughness, and where the two overlap.

Directed by

Emma Zuck

Emma Zuck is a filmmaker and writer. She is wrapped up in the sentimental— unraveling themes of love, home, queerness, and exploring the in-betweens. She sees poetry all around her and hopes to nurture community both on set and in theatres.

Sea Star

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 12m

An older Black man partakes in his first swimming lesson while, beneath the surface, he is battling with his own hardships.

Directed by

Tyler Mckenzie Evans

Tyler Mckenzie Evans is a Black-Canadian director and screenwriter. Weekly childhood trips to the cinema fueled his love of storytelling, leading to acclaimed short films like DIASPORA (TIFF 2022) and SEA STAR (TIFF 2025). An alumnus of the 2023 TIFF Filmmakers Lab, his goal is to create captivating stories centered around Black people and people of colour. He is currently developing his debut feature film.

Director will be in attendance

Niimi

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Drama
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English, Ojibwe
  • Length: 15m
  • Advisory: Discussion and thematics of sexual abuse
  • Watch Trailer

An Indigenous ballerina attempts to reignite her passion for dancing following a traumatic incident with her previous coach.

Directed by

Dana Solomon

Dana Solomon is a multi-disciplinary Indigenous artist based in Mississauga, Ontario. Her acting credits include Gail Maurice’s film Blood Lines (TIFF), Netflix’s Anne with E, Houston Bone’s web series Teenagers, and CBC’s Heartland and Diggstown. As a writer and director, her short film Niimi recently premiered at TIFF.

Director will be in attendance

King’s Court

  • Year: 2025
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Country: Canada
  • Language: English
  • Length: 20m
  • Watch Trailer

A fast-paced look at friendship, family and the journey to manhood in modern society, King’s Court blurs the line between documentary and fiction, immersing viewers in the raw emotions and struggles of two lifelong friends in Toronto’s Bleecker Street neighbourhood—one of Canada’s most diverse and densely populated areas. Through engaging, cinematic storytelling both on and off their favourite basketball court, we root for these inspiring young men in pursuit of identity and acceptance.

Directed by

Serville Poblete

Serville Poblete is a Toronto-based filmmaker from Bleecker Street. His debut feature, Altar Boy, was released in 2021. His second feature Lovely will be released in summer 2025. His second short documentary In the Morning Sun will premiere on the 2026 festival circuit. Serve is currently filming his third feature, Sunburn.

Director will be in attendance

Speakers and panelists

Dana Solomon Panelist

Tyler Mckenzie Evans Panelist

Serville Poblete Panelist

Trâm Anh Nguyễn Panelist

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