A Lett

The Letter

In this very personal and poetic film, veteran documentarian Serge Giguère pores through 100 letters written by his late mother to him and his 15 siblings. In them, she details the trials and tribulations of raising 16 children in rural Quebec, while helping to run a family carpentry business. Through inventive and playful techniques, Giguère brings the stories alive, applying creative approaches to family photographs, archival footage and staged reenactments. He mixes his mother's stories with his own memories and those of his siblings, some of whom hear for the first time what their mother had to say about them. Through these intertwining stories, the film presents not only a testament of a mother's complicated love for her many children, but also offers an intimate look at 1950s working class Quebec. - Aisha Jamal (Hot Docs Film Festival)

Ben wanders around the tourist attractions in Geneva, guided by his sister's voice. A wannabe homage to Benoît Giroux (1981-2019).

This posthumous tribute to Blind Melon documents the band's ascendancy to the top of the charts, including extensive footage of live club performances, their set at Woodstock '94, late-night television appearances, and behind-the-scenes footage of the recording sessions for their final album. Songs include "Soup," "Toes Across the Floor," "St. Andrews Hall," "Soul One" and "No Rain (Ripped Away Version)."

Jean Rouch’s camera follows his friend, filmmaker/actor/critic Farrokh Ghaffari, as he walks and talks us through the famous Shah Mosque in Esfehan. While guiding him and answering his questions, Ghaffari makes Rouch discover the beauties of the architecture of the mosque and its impact on the city. Throughout the tour, they discuss Islam’s complex relationship with death, sex and cinema.

This film is a moving tribute to French filmmaker Jean Rouch. Pauwels, a former collaborator of Rouch, accompanies him on a trip to Japan. In this cinematic letter, which he himself calls “a journey into the memory”, Pauwels philosophises about the essence of cinema and, consequently, of life.

A plucky businesswoman agrees to receive love letters to a prefect’s wife from a young official, and soon finds herself embroiled in a scandal that inflames a town’s class tensions.

A young man writes letters to X...

In this epistolary film, the traveler gives us his impressions of Africa parallel to the expression of his amorous distress. The images of the present intertwine with the incessant echoes of lost love, combining intimate pain with the misery of a country torn apart by internal struggles and poverty.

Marco and Vittoria are a couple of university students. She is tied and attracted to the elderly Professor V and accepts his dinner invitation.

The Land Without Evil is the mythology that guides the Guaraní communities. It narrates the search for a lost paradise. From the moment that Europeans crossed the Atlantic, it became the anima of a resistance discourse. How many different weapons does it take for a fight? The solo exhibition of Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy, one of the most engaged women among Brazil’s Indigenous filmmakers combines new works and the archive behind her audiovisual journey over the past 15 years, always in close collaboration with the Mbyá-Guarani Cinema Collective. It presents Indigenous cinematic practice as a tool of resistance and healing showcasing intimate and painful thoughts on the feminine, on spirituality, colonization, and the relationship to land.

Thandeka, a young Black journalist, lives in fear of Johannesburg's past. She's so troubled that she can't work, and her relationship with her 13-year-old deaf daughter Mangi goes from bad to worse. One day Me'Tau, an elderly woman, arrives at the newspaper's office. Ten years earlier, Thandeka witnessed the murder of the woman's daughter Dinéo by the secret police. Me'Tau wants Thandeka to find the murderers and Dinéo's body so that the girl can be buried in accordance with tradition. What Me'Tau couldn't know is that Thandeka has already paid for her knowledge, for having dared stand up to the apartheid system run by the whites. Meanwhile, Mangi secretly prepares a Zulu love letter: four embroidered images representing solitude, loss, hope, and love, as a final gesture towards her mother so that she won't give up the fight.

Office. Ordinary work day. One of the executives slowly walks to his office. When he opens the door, he is surprised by a letter that had been stealthily left on the floor. The executive picks up the envelope and notices there is no sender. What could it be?

Every year, letters come in from 56 countries in 30 languages and the numbers keep growing. Follow the 11,000 coast-to-coast volunteer employees involved in Canada Post’s incredible “Write to Santa” Program.

In the heart of the Montreal district of Parc-Extension, a poet of Haitian origin settles in a café to collect the stories, requests, and dreams of neighbors. Why? Because voters decided to write to their MP, now the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada.

Lisa Lewenz retraces the steps of her Jewish grandmother who dared to film life in Berlin during the rise of Nazi Germany.

Based on three different places, the film portrays the infractions to which people living in modern day China are subjected due to rapid developments: in the deceptively idyllic Yangshuo in the rainy south; in the apocalyptic coal mining site of Wuhai in the parched north; and in Chongqing, the urban behemoth on the Yangtze River. The protagonists give their accounts of the unsurmounted past, the precarious present and their tentative steps into the future. The film thus paints a complex image of the mental state of the people in this complicated country.

5th Photobook shot in Guam.

Robert drives his car along the country roads in the company of his two friends Antoine and Louis. He is obsessed with the incandescent feeling of his childhood love, Hélène. After several years of absence and many letters exchanged, he receives a final letter announcing her return. Passionate and unrestrained, Robert will have to face the resurgent memory, taking with him all forms of reasonable reality.