White Right: Meeting the Enemy
When Deeyah Khan was six, her father took her to her first anti-racism rally. A Pakistani immigrant to Norway, he promised her that things would get better and that the skinhead gangs that terrorised their family and families like them would soon find themselves relics of past prejudices, that bigotry belonged in history, that tomorrow would […]
St Andrews Cinema Politica- Where Olive Trees Weep
Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not something that anyone would imagine as the first step toward winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act Wangari Maathai, a woman born in rural Kenya, started down the path that reclaimed her country’s land from 100 years of deforestation, provided new sources of […]
Breaking the Frame
BREAKING THE FRAME is a feature–length documentary portrait of the New York artist Carolee Schneemann by Canadian filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska. A pioneer of performance and body art as well as avant-garde cinema, Schneemann has been breaking the frames of the art world for five decades, in a variety of mediums, challenging assumptions of feminism, gender, […]
From Ground Zero
Through striking authorial engagements with allegory and creative actuality, these filmmakers’ testimonies of confinement under relentless bombardment and imposed famine expose audiences to fragments of their daily struggle to survive — and to do so with dignity. Khamis Masharawi’s Soft Skin enters an animation workshop providing art therapy to children, many of whom are newly orphaned, as […]
You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
A poorly recorded video starts. The door of the interrogation room opens. Behind table a young prisoner in chains and dressed in orange sits waiting. Two men and a woman enter the cell: Man 1: How’s your English?Omar Khadr: Good.Man 1: It is good, eh?Omar Khadr: Yea.Man 1: Look, the reason we’re down here, we […]
Challenge Nationalism on National Canadian Film Day with These On Demand Docs
Looking for critical Cancon on Canadian Film Day 150? We’ve got you covered.
Cinema Politica Groningen presents documentary film Gulabi Gang by Nishtha Jain
Discussion on Gentrification with Lulu Wei
Cinema Politica Concordia hosted a discussion on gentrification and displacement, urban redevelopment, and affordable housing with Lulu Wei, the director of THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE THIS PLACE, ANYPLACE.
ArtDox
While documentary is in itself an art form, often called “informational art,” documentaries that focus on other art forms or artists working in various art milieus are uniquely positioned as works that examine art via art. In recent years many such “art docs” have been produced in Canada, yet these films and videos remain mostly […]
CP ON DEMAND: Top 10 For 2020
Cinema Politica continues to bring you inspiring independent documentaries available through CP On Demand, and we’ve compiled a brief list of our top screened films this year from our streaming platforms!
Screening of Notes on Displacement
Nations and Migrations
November 28, 2016 – May 31, 2017 Working with the curatorial guideposts of mobility, origins, community and belonging, Cinema Politica has selected a program of independent film and videos that highlight issues of nationhood and migration from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Canada is one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse places on […]
Documentary Futurism: The Next 150
How do we document that which has yet to occur? Cinema Politica’s Documentary Futurism: The Next 150 project seeks to usher in a new kind of filmmaking that brings actuality into conversation with speculation, and realism with the imaginary. Taking inspiration from Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, speculative fiction and non-fiction, these 15 films inaugurate a new […]
First Peoples, First Screens 1
First Peoples, First Screens (FPFS) showcases contemporary Indigenous political filmmaking* from across Canada, including documentary, animation, experimental and genre fiction of varying lengths. We are thrilled to circulate four separate clusters of thematically grouped works throughout the Canadian part of the Cinema Politica network, and to provide a platform to discuss Indigenous art, culture, politics, […]
CP Pandemic Playlist Vol 2: Health and Community Care
From front-line workers caring for those infected, to those working with grieving loved ones, to those providing crucial services – care has never been so urgent, nor so integral …
