Documenting “The O-Show”

Fascinating stories and people are a true passion for director Sharad Kharé, and his award-winning documentary film The O-Show will be screened as a part of this year’s Indian Summer Festival on July 8, 2022. The documentary showcases the life and works of Orene Askew, also known as DJ O Show, a highly sought after…

Skoden’s beacon of reconciliation

For three days, the Skoden Indigenous Film Festival (SIFF) will be celebrating Indigenous filmmakers across Canada while also promoting SFU’s interests in diversity and reconciliation. It will also feature Indigenous cultural traditions including a welcome ceremony and witness. Skoden is a slang term which means “let’s go then!” The film festival was founded in 2019…

An untold Inuk story in the making

Last December, Lindsay McIntyre, a filmmaker of Inuk and Scottish descent won the Women In the Director’s Chair’s (WIDC) Feature Film Award. Estimated at $250,000 in services and rentals, the prize will support the making of her first feature film The Words We Can’t Speak, expected for 2024. “It’s a story about identity and belonging,…

How far can paying off debt go?

Director Tunç Şahin wants the hunted to become the hunter in his film Two Types of People. The movie, presented by the Vancouver Turkish Film Festival (VTFF) on Dec. 8. follows three characters and their will to survive a system that puts them into heavy debt. Şahin and producer Ersan Çongar reveal that their film reflects…

Portraits from a Fire – A new classic

Portraits from a Fire is a film focused on a young boy, Tyler, who uses the power of cinema to unravel the secrets of his reserve. Through this journey, one sees the loneliness that Tyler faces due to having an unstable household as his father is distant and his mother is deceased. This loneliness fuels Tyler…

The invisible workers of the gig economy

The economic mammoth that is the global gig economy is the subject of director and UBC film professor Shannon Walsh’s film The Gig is Up. From the experiences of Parisian drivers sustaining the most popular delivery and taxiing apps, to the trials of Nigerian “crowd workers” who make a living sorting algorithms and search engine…

Someone Like Me- The challenges of queer solidarity in Vancouver

Drake, a 22-year-old gay man from Uganda, leaves his country behind. In Canada, he is welcomed by a group of strangers from Vancouver’s queer community united under the banner of Rainbow Refugee, a non-profit that connects LGBTQ+ asylum claimants with sponsors. Someone Like Me, a documentary released in 2021 by the directing duo Sean Horlor…

Vancouver Queer Film Festival – Breaking Fast portrays love and joy as an act of resistance

As an inside voice of the queer Muslim community, Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF)’s Closing Gala Film delivers an intelligent rom-com that is also a celebration on intersectional identities. “I have created the gay, Muslim version of Julia Roberts,” humorously says director Mike Mosallam about his acclaimed film Breaking Fast. Building complex and realistic queer characters,…

Supermarket clerks and the human imagination

In our lives, we do some activities so automatically that we do not realize how art, or even existential questions might be present in them. Grocery shopping is one example. As customers, we tend to do it quickly, and not think about the relationships between the supermarket workers, and the richness of the universe. That…

Chinuk Wawa – reviving an endangered Indigenous language

The precise number of languages spoken on this planet is not really known. For a variety of reasons, some may become endangered, and finally lost. Some examples of lost languages are Latin, Sanskrit, Coptic (the language of the Egyptians) and Sumerian. The main reasons they are no longer spoken is that their native speakers are…