Justine Pimlott

A Mother Apart

In this emotional, sweeping tale of healing and forgiveness, powerhouse Jamaican American poet and LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin embarks on an international journey to re-imagine the art of mothering—having been abandoned by her own mother as a young child.

Boat People

As a child in Vietnam, Thao’s mother often rescued ants from bowls of sugar water. Years later they would return the favour. Boat People is an animated documentary that uses a striking metaphor to trace one family’s flight across the turbulent waters of history.

Have You Eaten?

Living in downtown Toronto to attend school, Lina Li returns to the comfort of home in Thornhill and her mother's cooking. In this candid short, filmmaker Lina Li and her mother engage in an intimate conversation about immigration to Canada, misunderstandings, barriers to communicating, love and the taste of home.

Inconvenient Indian

Based on the bestselling book, this urgent feature documentary from celebrated director Michelle Latimer will take viewers on a journey into the mind of one of the world’s foremost Indigenous intellectuals, and one of our greatest storytellers: Thomas King.

The Bassinet

When a vintage bassinet appears at filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung and long-time fiancée Victoria Mata’s home, it sets off a chain reaction of emotions. "The Bassinet" is a gentle and affecting story about Tiffany’s personal struggle with the intersection of her sexual orientation and cultural identity, and the cross-generational burden of having a baby in the context of rigid social constructs of marriage and family.

Reviving The Roost

Filmmaker and bestselling author Vivek Shraya’s ode to a popular Edmonton gay bar that closed in 2007. With pulsating neon-light animation, Reviving the Roost is a story about community complexity and longing, and an elegy to a lost space.

What Walaa Wants

Raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank while her mother was in prison, Walaa dreams of being a policewoman, wearing a uniform, avoiding marriage, and earning a salary. Despite discouragement from her family, Walaa applies - and gets in. But her own rebellious behavior and a complicated relationship with her mother are a challenge, as are the circumstances under which she lives. Following Walaa from 15 to 21, this first-ever look inside the Palestinian police academy brings us the story of a young woman navigating formidable obstacles, learning which rules to break and follow, and disproving the negative predictions from her surroundings and the world at large.

Sculpting Memory

Sculpting Memory places Atom Egoyan in an audiovisual environment woven from the fabric of his own films―a conceptual move that references Egoyan’s adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape while evoking Egoyan’s own work as a moving-image installation artist and his concern with the recording and displaying of images.

Derby Crazy Love

Meet Smack Daddy, Suzy Hotrod, Kamikaze Kitten, and the other badass warriors leading the Roller Derby Revolution. Derby Crazy Love chronicles not only the birth and evolution of modern Flat Track Roller Derby, but also shows the people who are changing how we look at women in sport and femininity, one booty block at a time.

Laugh In the Dark

Laugh In the Dark takes us into the heart of “queer family values” with an odd little wagon train of “six fags, two dykes and an old lady” who pull into the dilapidated town of Crystal Beach, Ontario in the early l980s. The “boys” dream of restoring this former resort town to its earlier glory, with a twist. They open a B&B, and stage lavish cabarets, complete with lip synching drag queens, to raise money for early AIDS awareness.