Originally from the tropical archipelago of Indonesia, Dr. Tammara Soma, mom of three and professor of food system planning at Simon Fraser University has dedicated her life and heart to developing a more equitable and sustainable food system in Canada and beyond. In Tammara's first documentary, Food is My Teacher, she delves into the pains of the past, including her own harrowing experience dealing with an eating disorder, to showcase how food can heal communities, body and spirit. This is Tammara's first experience in creating a documentary. She co-wrote and co-directed Food is My Teacher with award-winning filmmaker Brandy Yanchyk, who also produced the film. They travelled across Alberta and British Columbia on a quest to learn how food is healing within different communities.
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Okpik: Little Village in the Arctic is a stunning and eye-opening documentary about one family's pursuit to becoming fully self-sufficient, living off the land in a remote location on the north end of the Mackenzie River. Using local materials and traditional knowledge Inuit/Gwich'in Hunter, Kylik Kisoun Taylor will re-establish and re-imagine the lost practice of building an Inuvialuit log house with a sod roof with the intention of creating housing security in his traditional territory of the Beaufort Delta. Kylik builds his future at his off-grid camp and creates an opportunity for language and cultural revitalization. Filmed entirely at Okpik Village, 16 km north of Inuvik.
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Avis Favaro interviews Emily Nash, a Canadian teen who has a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). These people absorb information normally, but their memories do not decay. Scientists are trying to identify the regions of the brain that appear more active in people with HSAM, and thus develop treatment for people suffering from memory loss of dementia and Alzheimer's. In sleep studies of HSAM people, EEG detects more sleep spindles which may help the brain synchronize memories and secure them more efficiently. Emily hopes to pursue a career in biomedical scientific research and is enjoying meeting other people with her "gift", as they struggle with the anxiety resulting from never forgetting the bad. Her mother, a psychiatric nurse, is also coaching her daughter on how to manage that burden.
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Who would you be if you could just be yourself? Might a genetic mutation be the very thing that allows this nice Jewish butch lesbian to be fully seen at last? Meet Sarah, 57. Lesbian? For sure. Jewish? Yes and no. Mother? In all but one sense. Trans? No, just often mistaken as such. Breast cancer survivor? Well, that's the plan, the survival bit, but without the cancer or the breasts. "Not Quite That" is an intimate and insightful exploration of how we are seen, how we see ourselves, and why it matters.
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In war torn 1980s El Salvador, Chava, an eleven-year-old boy, suddenly becomes the "man of the house" in a time when the government's army is forcibly recruiting children for civil war. As his single mother fights to protect her children, their village becomes both playground and battlefield. This is about life, love, the hope of peace, and the ennobling power of the human spirit. Based on the true story of screenwriter Oscar Torres's embattled childhood.
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Oversubscribed opioids, a supply poisoned with Fentanyl and Carfentanyl, and outdated Government policy have created the deadliest conditions for drug users in human history. The result is toxic and, if there is no change, people will continue to die at an unprecedented rate. Toxic explores drugs, addiction, and possible solutions.
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Divine G, imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art.
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Manufactured landscapes is a striking documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of "manufactured landscapes"--quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, and dams--Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization's materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. Manufactured landscapes powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
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The huge earthworks and mounds scattered through the eastern half of the United States prompted people in the nineteenth century to speculate that a lost civilization had preceded the Indigenous peoples then living among the mounds. Though we've known for some time that the ancestors of those peoples actually built the mounds, archaeologists are still exploring their contents for a better understanding of their builders.
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The great Maya civilization of Central America has long intrigued archaeologists, who have investigated its economic, social, and political bases, and its mysterious collapse around 900 A.D. Until recently, archaeologists theorized that the ancient Maya peoples practiced slash-and-burn agriculture that required great tracts of forest land, and that as population grew the dwindling forest resources could no longer support the civilization. It was thought that a small, centralized, priestly elite was supported by an undifferentiated mass of people in the countryside which surrounded temple complexes. This film takes another look at older theories and recent archaeological advances, and suggests an interpretation of Maya society in which a flourishing trade in salt was complemented by a form of intensive agriculture based on artificially raised fields on swampy land. This economic base could have sustained the large population while necessitating the more elaborate social hierarchies and political structures that are suggested by recent excavations.
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The year is 1659 and after a shipwreck, the sole survivor, Robinson Crusoe, is washed ashore on a deserted tropical island. Suddenly faced with a hostile and unknown wilderness, he carves out a life for himself with his bare hands. Remarkably, he learns how to survive the maddening absence of human companionship and intense loneliness. An amazing story about the human spirit's ability to endure what seems like insurmountable challenges.
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Che Guevara, the archetypal Marxist revolutionary. Che was also a physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. We go to Dublin to meet Jim Fitzpatrick who met Che and designed the classic commercially renowned image.
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This gripping series examines cases of disappeared detainees and human rights violations that happened during the heinous dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Chilean director Hernán Caffiero uses real life stories as inspiration for these dramatized vignettes that grant us insight into what fascism looks and feels like.
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The ad and the id examines advertising as applied psychology, and its subliminal messages of sex and death. It also looks at advertising as applied psychoanalysis designed to sell products based on the human desire to break free of sexual repression and to deny mortality.
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The Wheelie Peeps are sick and tired of people taking their parking spots. After commiserating, they decide to do what they do best - raise hell! Things get heated when some unassuming government employees show up to work to find their parking lot has been overtaken by hundreds of wheelchairs. Meanwhile, Victoria is offered the opportunity of a lifetime and feels inspired to reach out to Brian to share the news and bid him a final farewell. After the parking protest gains media attention, the Wheelie Peeps celebrate with a monster-sized bonfire where they reflect on their lives, friendship and just how far they've come. Warning: The following program contains coarse language. Viewer discretion is advised.
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EVELYN enters the world of the wise and wry human that is Evelyn Christopher, and offers a little window into what we have lost with all our rushing around. Evelyn Christopher is 94 years old and still grows enough food to give surplus away to neighbours. She comes from a time when time had a different texture. A place where pace was in step with the seasons. She understands the land, the sea, and the air. She doesn't have much use for the goings on of contemporary society. She is one of the last of her kind, and with her goes a way of being in the world: dirt under your fingernails, chores every morning at dawn, knowing just how to grow a turnip, stacking every stitch of firewood for the lean winter months... there will never be another Evelyn.
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Montreal, Canada. One of North America's last remaining affordable cities is now in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis. As a result, the face of homelessness is visibly changing. "Renovictions" are on the rise while demand in homeless day centres explodes. In the Plateau Mont-Royal - a neighbourhood synonymous with gentrification - a 90-unit building named Manoir Lafontaine becomes the symbol of renoviction resistance in Quebec. An intimate portrait of a socio-political crisis, this multilayered film explores the human impact of real estate speculation on the cities of tomorrow.
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Enter the world of a farm-to-table chef, farmers, researchers and scientists working in harmony with regenerative farming practices. Beautifully shot and set to an evocative original soundtrack "Farming Without Harming" takes us through the major agricultural revolutions that empowered people with ever-greater food security. Discover how today, we are already producing healthier food, healing our lands, cleansing our waterways and creating a path to a more sustainable future.
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From his home in the Squamish Nation, host Simon Baker traces the path of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, from the Oil Sands in Alberta to the tanker terminal planned for Kitimat, BC, to understand why First Nations are opposed. The Native Planet documentary series explores the unique spiritual connection global native peoples have with mother earth. Host Simon Baker takes you deep inside Indigenous communities and cultures where charismatic leaders are waging a passionate defense of mother earth.
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First Nations societies embraced variances in gender and sexuality, and many nations even have distinct words to honor these people - Winkte (Lakota), Nadleehe (Navajo), Sipiniq (Inuit). In Winnipeg Drew meets the drag team, the Bannock Babes. They see themselves as modern day tricksters or shape-shifters, embracing both the masculine and the feminine while sharing important messages with a sense of humour. Two-spirit philosophy can be a positive force for everyone.
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500 million years ago life left this blue womb and colonized the land, but we are still intricately linked to the ocean. Our climates, coastlines, ecosystems, and economies are tied to the perpetual movement of water between continents. The great ocean currents are the arteries and veins of Planet Earth! This is the story of one particularly fascinating flow - the East Australian Current, a massive oceanic river that stretches the length of Australia's east coast. However the problem of plastic waste affects not just this area of the ocean, but it is a global issue affecting many marine species.
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Seven women, three generations, one family and countless secrets and lies. Meet Canada's Gayest Family. UNUSUALLY NORMAL spans three eras of women in one family household - the youngest, Madison Ford, draws a family tree with 2 grandmothers and 4 mothers. This documentary builds on intimate family videos, photographs, archival footage and social media postings (their Tik Tok account boasts 200,000 followers) to reflect LGBTQ+ stories from the '40s until present day. Through these very personal accounts, UNUSUALLY NORMAL explores obstacles from family rejection to clandestine love, and the happiness found by allowing themselves to live freely, outing themselves, falling in love and leading life on their terms.
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The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl's own life as she navigates a new relationship.
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