Dreams of Sunlight Through Trees

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A visual poetic collage and a place of joy. Awaiting the decision from here to there

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Before the European colonization, a bispitirual person called Woman Dress used to roam across the Prairies, listening and telling tales. The film includes archival footage and historical reenactments to pass along this story from the Cuthand family’s oral tradition.

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Inspired by a dream and produced on an iPhone, Guardian of Sleep features an array of images, animations of petroglyph-like markings, running herds of caribou and filmed footage of the baton-twirling artist leading a parade from a forest. Illuminating Longboy’s long-standing interest in emergent technologies and their potential, not only as a tool or a medium, but also as metaphorical constructs that, in this instance, mirror the forms dreams take as inherently collagist.

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A journey into Aly’s world and his personal growth through the eyes of his new furry, Eden. Aly opens up about his next character, Lusia, who will resemble him in every way.

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When Ellie receives the news that their best friend Sam is leaving for art school the next morning, it seems like their entire summer together has been ruined. With the help of their friends, not only do they experience the night of their lives, but they find courage within their hearts to make it count.

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An audio sensory experience that follows a sleepless Noah as they navigate a dreamscape filled with old memories of their current relationship with Connor. Someone who he cannot fix.

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A weekend at a music festival is brought to a grinding halt when Tai is confronted by a white person wearing a Native Ceremonial Headdress. He retreats into his mind where a roundtable of various versions of his identity meets to come up with the perfect thing to say.

Feature

PORTUGUESE • ENGLISH ST | Wellington (defiantly nicknamed Baby) trades his detention centre cell for the streets of São Paulo, absorbed into the life of an in-demand “escort” with old school methods. Torn between this erotic father figure, two chosen families, and the mother who left him, Wellington must discern which link is the strongest. Against a backdrop of corrupt cops, vengeful kingpins, and Brazilian ball culture, maybe-18-year-old Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) falls for 42-year-old sex worker cum drug dealer Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), who has a son not much younger than Wellington being raised by lesbian mothers. The two share a charged, teasing bond with yo-yoing power dynamics. Wellington softens Ronaldo, schooling him in voguing’s ebullience and showing him his battle scars, while Ronaldo grounds his protege, giving him boxing lessons while doling out paternal advice and setting strict boundaries. Boundaries that Ronaldo is desperate to maintain and Wellington comes to resent when youthful potential and a biological parent draw him away. Propelled by Marcelo Caetano’s stylish direction, this gritty coming-of-age tale wrestles with themes of love and coercion, considering what’s still possible for a restless heart when a ‘baby’ becomes a man.

Documentary

In Sandi DuBowski’s crucial, decades-spanning documentary (executive produced by Darren Aronofsky), Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie takes on the Orthodox regime amid escalating reactions to his experimental spirit. It will take harrowing face-to-face confrontations, heated ideological conversations, and all the Radical Faerie magic he can muster to weather the onslaught. Part of a line of rabbis stretching back to the 11th century, at age 28 Amichai left his isolated, pressurized upbringing in Israel for the freedoms of late-90s New York. In America, he joined the Radical Faeries and tapped into the feminine divine with his Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross drag persona, finding redemption through transgression, and founding the God-optional congregation Lab/Shul. Still, he encounters a wall of tradition and the pull of his familial dynasty. Enrolling to become a rabbi at the Conservative-leaning Jewish Theological Seminary, he endeavours to change the system from the inside, but soon finds himself at odds with his peers and “co-conspirators,” defending laws he once broke. Will he have the stamina and willpower to remain true to his ideals, or will his lofty goals end up quelling his radical energy and all that he means to others?

DocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

The work of Two-Spirit, nêhiyaw (Cree) artist George Littlechild took the reality of residential schools head-on decades before it would enter the collective Canadian conscience. A Sixties Scoop survivor, Littlechild uses his “whimsical,” improvised technique to unlock colourful exuberance and long-held trauma. Conor McNally, a Métis filmmaker, honours his journey. Littlechild was given his great grandfather’s name, nanekawâsis, at a Powwow in 2001. Both Littlechild and the eponymously named film embody its meaning: “swift child.” As we pay witness to a childhood shuffled between foster homes and Littlechild’s emergence as a fleet-fingered artist, the documentary makes fluid connections between past and present. Archival footage blends with warmly tinted 16mm interviews of 65-year-old Littlechild, still evolving in his practice, still passing on his deeply felt knowledge of his ancestry and “Rainbow” spirit. Whereas his partner, John Powell, uses art to govern his freewheeling tendencies, Littlechild harnesses paint to break free of his circumscribed daily life, healing himself and his audience through enlightened transcendence. nanekawâsis begins and ends with a sky full of colour, beautifully eliding time, revealing how light and dark, expectancy and reflection are all indispensable parts of life’s circle.

Short

Albert and Sixten are getting married. Today. The only problem is that if they were completely honest with each other, they shouldn’t even be a couple anymore.

Feature

In a fraught exchange between Leipzig and Strasbourg, Fanny and Lena warm to each other while the situation around them heats up. As it gets harder to parse fact from fiction, too much trust and not enough, they look to protest movements to teach them what out-of-control adults cannot. Writer-director Claire Burger’s nuanced drama is bracingly of-the-moment, capturing topical issues with a foreboding sense of longing and imminent disaster, and inspiring fiery performances from her leads, including Nina Hoss as a mother undone. After an initially cold reception from Lena (Josefa Heinsius) when she arrives in Germany, 17-year-old Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) will do anything to ingratiate herself with her prickly pen pal. Chocolate-covered shrooms, sexual experimentation, bonding over Antifa and black bloc protest movements—each attempt at connection becomes more daring than the one before, their “Franco-German friendship” mirroring the heated clashes of our time. When the school exchange is flipped, and Lena is now the fish out of water in France, giving into the attraction sizzling under her animosity will mean coming to terms with a world tearing apart at the seams and the fantasies built up to survive it.

Feature

In the vein of the Tony award-winning musical Stereophonic, this must-see drama is a Behind the Music-style glimpse of a 2000s Toronto indie band with Fleetwood Mac-like flare ups. With a trans frontman and queer members, The New Normals break boundaries while breaking one another’s hearts. Building off the source material, the novel Heidegger Stairwell by Kayt Burgess, Karen Knox maintains balletic control of multiple perspectives and aesthetics, following how each of the five core members handles firsts: first music video, first phone sex job, first love triangle. Music saves this close-knit crew from quarrels when it’s not causing them, but it’s the in-fighting, the “threads of connection and tension” that keep their audience hungering for more. Will the trans frontman (Lane Webber) stay with his queer girlfriend and songwriting partner (June Laporte) or find a different tune with Lugh (Daniel Gravelle)? Will the band survive or live on only in tribute? These concerns converge in a film charged with envy, creative friendship, and reckless love, and chock-full of pedigreed talent, including co-writing credits from award-winning Canadian writer, Zoe Whittall and festival alumni, Pat Mills as well as original songs from Stars’ Torquil Campbell.

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Five thousand twenty five walks. Fifty-two miles of floors mopped. Seventy hours watching movie stars kiss. Alice, a headstrong elder dyke, navigates environmentally induced illness while she contends with her unique notion of legacy.

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Before the European colonization, a bispitirual person called Woman Dress used to roam across the Prairies, listening and telling tales. The film includes archival footage and historical reenactments to pass along this story from the Cuthand family’s oral tradition.

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Determined to breathe new life into the queer stock character of the sex worker, budding writer Max (masquerading as Sebastian) becomes a “digital hustler” while bathing in the words of Bret Easton Ellis. What starts out as novel fodder becomes a high-stakes balancing act between liberation and exploitation. Close-lipped and leery of scrutiny, even the publicness of social media, “wholesome boy next door” Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is able to act out his “desire to taste everything” in London bedrooms. First with older men, including the kind and curious Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), then with more daring configurations. But when shame unexpectedly creeps into his initial, unfettered view of the sex trade, Max finds everything from his book proposal to his very sense of self tested. Before he lets his obsession with how he’s perceived subsume him, he must decide what kind of writer he will be, what kind of lover, what kind of man. His finger on the cultural pulse, Indiewire’s LGBTQ+ Filmmaker on the Rise Mikko Mäkelä (A Moment in the Reeds, I+N31, 2018) pits the coldness of market forces against the beating of a warming heart to see which—in the 21st century—will endure.

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An audio sensory experience that follows a sleepless Noah as they navigate a dreamscape filled with old memories of their current relationship with Connor. Someone who he cannot fix.