Image+Nation
Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger

AMÉLIE HARDY | CANADA | 2024 | 16 MIN | ENGLISH

AMÉLIE HARDY | CANADA | 2024 | 16 MIN | ENGLISH

VIRTUALShortMADE AU CANADACOMPETITION

Synopsis

Between loads of laundry at the corner laundromat, Cooper shares the tumultuous story of her gender reassignment journey.

Filmmaker Bio

After completing her film studies at Montreal’s University, Amélie directs several short films. Her documentary work, in which humanity, aestheticism and an ingenious way of staging reality define her style. Amélie's projects (About memory and loss, Ordinary's Life Chronicles, Happy Life, Train Hopper) have earned several awards and have traveled around the world.

Producer

Sarah Mannering, Fanny Drew

Writer

Amélie Hardy, Cooper Josephine Holt

Cinematographer

Myrian Payette

Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Also playing with

PosterShort
Nous partirons[FOCUS ACADIE]8 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

Gilbert Mhanna is a queer Lebanese artist based in Toronto. His art is baladi, a dance traditionally reserved for cis women. Together, we'll explore the relationship of his Araboqueer body to this Canadian space. How does this country continue to flow through their veins?

PosterShort
FuReality[MADE AU CANADA]4 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

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.

PosterShort
Jesse[MADE AU CANADA]12 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

A male teenager planning to come out to his father imagines different outcomes while portraying them in different cinematographic genres in his mind.

PosterShort
Ephemera[MADE AU CANADA]13 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

Robin is a young woman who lives alone above a gas station in North Bay. Every night she watches truckers fill their tanks up and munch on pepperettes. Robin has a secret. Robin is a porn addict. Robin can’t feel anything anymore.

PosterShort
AI WW Fight in Florida[MADE AU CANADA]1 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

I asked various AI to create images and narratives of black wonder womxn fighting in Florida. These are their responses: White supremacism, sexism, homotransphobia are spreading across the web. Let’s play with it and get back some power.

PosterShort
یک روز این سر One Day This Kid[MADE AU CANADA]17 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will talk.

PosterShort
Insta Gay[MADE AU CANADA]12 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

A gay millennial reels after breaking-up with a popular influencer.

PosterShort
Nous partirons[FOCUS ACADIE]8 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

Gilbert Mhanna is a queer Lebanese artist based in Toronto. His art is baladi, a dance traditionally reserved for cis women. Together, we'll explore the relationship of his Araboqueer body to this Canadian space. How does this country continue to flow through their veins?

PosterShort
FuReality[MADE AU CANADA]4 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

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.

PosterShort
Jesse[MADE AU CANADA]12 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

A male teenager planning to come out to his father imagines different outcomes while portraying them in different cinematographic genres in his mind.

PosterShort
Ephemera[MADE AU CANADA]13 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

Robin is a young woman who lives alone above a gas station in North Bay. Every night she watches truckers fill their tanks up and munch on pepperettes. Robin has a secret. Robin is a porn addict. Robin can’t feel anything anymore.

PosterShort
AI WW Fight in Florida[MADE AU CANADA]1 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

I asked various AI to create images and narratives of black wonder womxn fighting in Florida. These are their responses: White supremacism, sexism, homotransphobia are spreading across the web. Let’s play with it and get back some power.

PosterShort
یک روز این سر One Day This Kid[MADE AU CANADA]17 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will talk.

PosterShort
Insta Gay[MADE AU CANADA]12 minutesThis programme includes 8 filmsMADE AU CANADA 183 minutes

A gay millennial reels after breaking-up with a popular influencer.

You might also like

PosterShort
یک روز این سر One Day This Kid[MADE AU CANADA]17 minutes

One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will talk.

PosterDocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE
Si je meurs, ce sera de joie (If I die, It'll be of Joy)[COMPETITION]80 minutes

Outspoken Micheline (81) and sensitive artist Yves (68) have “insatiable” longings for sexual and relational intimacy. Francis (70) is a proudly “loudmouth(ed)” activist who wants to ensure that yearnings become reality. All, under the banner of Grey Pride, have no less an ambition than to change the world. Able to detect, as a minority, things that are unjust to all, queer seniors in France are revealing universal truths about the cult of youth and the medicalization of old age. These Grey Priders are combatting indifference, overhauling the nursing home model, and rethinking how spaces for the elderly accommodate libidos. Micheline, Yves, and Francis may have had their sex lives stifled by repression, loneliness, or AIDS, but they are far from ready to enter “The Zone” of societal relegation. They are prepared to take on embedded prejudices, as well as partners and friends with divergent views on death, in their revolutionary intentions. With stirring poeticism—seasons redolent of adaptation; trees symbolizing how bodies bend or break; desire represented by a glowing red sex toy—filmmaker Alexis Taillant shows us what it means to live “a quiet, wild life.”

PosterDocumentary
A Mother Apart[I+N x FMC / CMF SERIES]89 minutes

LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin easily identifies as a mother, poet, writer, dissenter, and truth speaker—it is the label of “daughter” that causes her the most pause. Forced to become a sleuth, she attempts to pierce the veil of secrecy around her mother’s life and come to terms with her absence. After decades pursuing “the career of lesbianism,” Chin is now hot on the trail of her mother Hazel and a more anchored sense of self. Chin travels from Brooklyn to Montreal, where Hazel lived after abandoning Chin in search of a better life, then onwards to far-flung destinations: Germany, Jamaica. Chin talks to neighbours and loved ones, piecing together the puzzle as she goes. With every clue, she is forced to confront past traumas and test the limits of forgiveness, all while caring for her daughter, with whom she famously stages “Living Room Protests” on YouTube. Tapping into the ferocity of Chin’s slam poetry and using digital collage to convey Hazel’s floral allure, director Laurie Tonwshend paints a dual portrait of motherhood. She also practices Chin’s hard-won brand of radical kindness and compassion, finding the grace in failure.

PosterShort
Uncomfy[MADE AU CANADA]6 minutes

When her self-help podcast asks her what she wishes to manifest, our hero realizes her desires are outgrowing her current relationship.

PosterShort
Répercuté[MADE AU CANADA]15 minutes

A man comes home to his lover on their anniversary expecting a romantic night of celebration only to find someone tied up in the bathroom.

PosterFeature
We Forgot to Break Up[I+N Connexe]93 minutes

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.

PosterShort
TTT[MADE AU CANADA]4 minutes

After the 100th 'The Thursday Testo,' (TTT), the tri-languistical references such as the Roman and Korean (Hangeul) alphabets and the Japanese syllabic (Katana) alphabet of the word TRANS on a comedy sketch by Kě.

PosterFeature
Langue étrangère[ZEITGEIST]101 minutes

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.

PosterShort
The Kitchen Sink[MADE AU CANADA]9 minutes

A traditional Maritime image: three generations of P.E.I. women wash dishes after holiday dinners. Their after-dinner conversations become revealing when one of their own begins his transition.

PosterShort
The Lily & The Scorpion[MADE AU CANADA]14 minutes

Infamous outlaws The Lily and The Scorpion are on the run after a bank job gone wrong, but as day turns into night, the partners’ trust in each other begins to fray.

PosterShort
یک روز این سر One Day This Kid[MADE AU CANADA]17 minutes

One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will talk.

PosterDocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE
Si je meurs, ce sera de joie (If I die, It'll be of Joy)[COMPETITION]80 minutes

Outspoken Micheline (81) and sensitive artist Yves (68) have “insatiable” longings for sexual and relational intimacy. Francis (70) is a proudly “loudmouth(ed)” activist who wants to ensure that yearnings become reality. All, under the banner of Grey Pride, have no less an ambition than to change the world. Able to detect, as a minority, things that are unjust to all, queer seniors in France are revealing universal truths about the cult of youth and the medicalization of old age. These Grey Priders are combatting indifference, overhauling the nursing home model, and rethinking how spaces for the elderly accommodate libidos. Micheline, Yves, and Francis may have had their sex lives stifled by repression, loneliness, or AIDS, but they are far from ready to enter “The Zone” of societal relegation. They are prepared to take on embedded prejudices, as well as partners and friends with divergent views on death, in their revolutionary intentions. With stirring poeticism—seasons redolent of adaptation; trees symbolizing how bodies bend or break; desire represented by a glowing red sex toy—filmmaker Alexis Taillant shows us what it means to live “a quiet, wild life.”

PosterDocumentary
A Mother Apart[I+N x FMC / CMF SERIES]89 minutes

LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin easily identifies as a mother, poet, writer, dissenter, and truth speaker—it is the label of “daughter” that causes her the most pause. Forced to become a sleuth, she attempts to pierce the veil of secrecy around her mother’s life and come to terms with her absence. After decades pursuing “the career of lesbianism,” Chin is now hot on the trail of her mother Hazel and a more anchored sense of self. Chin travels from Brooklyn to Montreal, where Hazel lived after abandoning Chin in search of a better life, then onwards to far-flung destinations: Germany, Jamaica. Chin talks to neighbours and loved ones, piecing together the puzzle as she goes. With every clue, she is forced to confront past traumas and test the limits of forgiveness, all while caring for her daughter, with whom she famously stages “Living Room Protests” on YouTube. Tapping into the ferocity of Chin’s slam poetry and using digital collage to convey Hazel’s floral allure, director Laurie Tonwshend paints a dual portrait of motherhood. She also practices Chin’s hard-won brand of radical kindness and compassion, finding the grace in failure.

PosterShort
Uncomfy[MADE AU CANADA]6 minutes

When her self-help podcast asks her what she wishes to manifest, our hero realizes her desires are outgrowing her current relationship.

PosterShort
Répercuté[MADE AU CANADA]15 minutes

A man comes home to his lover on their anniversary expecting a romantic night of celebration only to find someone tied up in the bathroom.

PosterFeature
We Forgot to Break Up[I+N Connexe]93 minutes

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.

PosterShort
TTT[MADE AU CANADA]4 minutes

After the 100th 'The Thursday Testo,' (TTT), the tri-languistical references such as the Roman and Korean (Hangeul) alphabets and the Japanese syllabic (Katana) alphabet of the word TRANS on a comedy sketch by Kě.

PosterFeature
Langue étrangère[ZEITGEIST]101 minutes

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.

PosterShort
The Kitchen Sink[MADE AU CANADA]9 minutes

A traditional Maritime image: three generations of P.E.I. women wash dishes after holiday dinners. Their after-dinner conversations become revealing when one of their own begins his transition.

PosterShort
The Lily & The Scorpion[MADE AU CANADA]14 minutes

Infamous outlaws The Lily and The Scorpion are on the run after a bank job gone wrong, but as day turns into night, the partners’ trust in each other begins to fray.