Wake

A struggling actress tracks down the star of a movie she hopes will be remade, only to uncover dark secrets.

With a hurricane raging outside their hospital, two nurses have one last job before evacuating: stow the “dead-on-arrival” corpse of a young girl in the downstairs morgue before the building floods.

When things get tough for offbeat Carys Reitman, she does what any emotionally isolated, modern girl would do - she goes to strangers' funerals...

A nuanced story of friendship, forbidden love and self-awareness in the face of grief.

In a remote mountain village in Northern Greece, a cameraperson peers into the artistic process of a theatre ensemble at work.

A chance encounter between two women on the Mersey ferry leads to an exploration of the loss they both carry and how they navigate life and memories in its wake.

The fateful reunion of four brothers quickly dissolves into a night of drinking, deceit, perversions, and death. They don't realize until it is too late that the party they are having is, in fact, a wake.

The ripple effect of a brother and sister's past catches up to them at the funeral of their father.

Short dance film examining contemporary attitudes to grief.

A repressed woman does away with her domineering father, freeing herself to pursue her heart's desire. Using a local folk magic called "root-work", she conjures a demon to aid her in creating the man of her dreams-- but soon finds herself in a waking nightmare.

Wake compares colonial paintings of New Zealand intended to encourage migration to the colonies in the 1850s, with filmed images of the same country 100 years later, shot by the filmmaker's father. This experimental film compares the vision of a "promised land" with the lived memory of migration and explores too, the misrepresentation of indigenous people during both these eras. The half-hour experimental film is a response to the death of the filmmaker's father, an event that ultimately led to her return to New Zealand after a decade in America.

Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis?

A woman looks out across a lake, where each drop of water contains a memory of a pioneer in women’s sports, preserved forever. This film was made as part of the 9th edition of the NFB's Hothouse apprenticeship.

"Wake is the result of an experimental project. The resulting animation is a playful voyage through the vibrant dreamscapes of the imagination, imbued with spontaneity, nostalgia, and the love of light. Entirely hand-painted, it’s a celebration of the ever-transforming nature of our vision and the joy of creation."—Mark Boston

Wake is a dirge in celluloid. It is a celebration of my father’s life, a meditation on his body and a visual record of mourning. When my father died, there was never a chance to see his body after life had left it. This film was made by placing his ashes directly on 35mm film in a dark room and moving the film a frame at a time. What we see in this process of photograming is not the object in the photographic sense, but instead a representation of the space surrounding an object. The photogram is a shadow charting the distance between things.

A college student must stay awake as he is haunted by a demon that threatens to put him to sleep forever.

A narcoleptic professor believes she witnessed a murder in her neighbor's home at the hands of a popular rapper. She becomes obsessed with finding the truth and is hell-bent on taking him down before he turns his wrath on her and her friends.

Rishab, a depressed writer with a writer's block is our protagonist. He has a loving girlfriend, Priyanka. He goes to a bar and comes home drunk every night; Priyanka hates it when Rishab drinks and tries to find the reason behind his alcoholism. As Rishab's condition gets worse as the days pass, we observe him for a span of three days from a neutral perspective, as he helplessly watches his life crumble in front of his eyes.

Carlo is a wacky, fun-loving boy with a passion for cookies and adventure. But after he falls into a magically deep sleep, things will never be the same!