Welcome to the newest and soon to be most talked about Film Festival this summer!

One of Ours -

1h 28 min
8:00pm - 9:30pm (August 18)

“One of Ours” is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Yasmine Mathurin and released in 2021.^[1] The film centers on the 2016 incident in which Josiah Wilson, a Haitian Canadian who was adopted into a Heiltsuk family and raised as a status member of the Heiltsuk Nation, was barred from participating in the All Native Basketball Tournament on the grounds that he is not indigenous by blood.

Finding The Light -

21 min
Saturday Aug 19, 2023 12:00pm - 12:21pm

"Finding the Light" is a powerful documentary that tells the story of Donna Hylton and her social justice nonprofit, "A Little Piece of Light." The film explores Donna's personal journey within the prison system and how she uses her experience to advocate for reform and support the reentry of Black women and LGBTQ+ individuals. It sheds light on the inspiring work of Donna and her organization, highlighting the importance of their efforts in promoting social justice.

Directed by: Brandon Hayes

Mr. Jane and Finch

44 min
Saturday, Aug 19, 2023 12:45pm - 1:30 pm

Winston LaRose, an 80-year-old community activist, inspires a Toronto community to challenge the traditional powers as he runs for political office for the first time.

Directed by: Alison Duke

Memento: A South African Artventure  

42 min
2:20PM - 3:00PM Saturday Aug 19, 2023

“Memento: A South African Artventure” is a lively, energetic archival documentary that chronicles the maiden voyage of several Afro-Canadian persons and their friends on an excursion to South Africa.

Directed by: Ryan Singh

Subjects of Desire

1h 41 min
4:00PM - 5:45 PM Saturday August 19

Explores the cultural shift in North American beauty standards towards embracing Black female aesthetics and features while exposing the deliberate and often dangerous portrayals of Black women in the media. From society’s new fixation on the ‘booty’, fuller lips, the dramatic rise of spray-tanned skin, ethnic hairstyles, and athletic bodies, some argue that Black women are having a beauty moment. But others, primarily Black women, argue that traditional Black features and attributes are seen as more desirable when they are on White women.

Directed by: Jennifer Holness

Finding Sally

78 min
6:30 pm - 7:50 pm Saturday August 19

Tells the incredible story of a 23-year-old woman from an upper-class family who became a communist rebel with the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party. Idealistic and in love, Sally got caught up in her country’s revolutionary fervour, landing on the military government’s most-wanted list. She went underground, and her family never saw her again. Four decades after Sally’s disappearance, filmmaker Tamara Dawit pieces together the mysterious life of her aunt Sally and revisits the Ethiopian “Red Terror”, a period of violence, upheaval, and mass killings that nearly wiped out a generation of educated young people in the country.

Directed by: Tamara Mariam Dawit

School To Prison Pipeline 

47 min
1:00 pm - 1:50 pm Sunday, Aug 20

The Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC) led a province-wide research and advocacy initiative on anti-Black racism and oppression in our educational and justice systems and produced Links to Justice — a documentary on the school-to-prison pipeline in Ontario, produced by Moses Latigo Odida.

Directed by: Moses Latigo Odida

Dope Is Death

1h 18 minutes
2:15 pm - 3:45 pm Sunday August 20

The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 - a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist.

Directed by: Mia Donovan