Alexandra Lazarowich

Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century. As the practice has changed over the years, Halpate profiles the hazards and history of the spectacle through the words of the tribe's alligator wrestlers themselves and what it has meant to their people's survival.

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

A short film about one of the most prominent yet often ignored landmarks of Los Sures, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, (the BQE). The film examines the architecture and fabric of the BQE through poetic imagery and experimental ambient sound recordings, inviting the audience to encounter urban landscape in a unique and curious way.

Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.

The Blackfoot bareback horse-racing tradition returns in the astonishingly dangerous Indian Relay. Siksika horseman Allison Red Crow struggles with secondhand horses and a new jockey on his way to challenging the best riders in the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Cree director Alexandra Lazarowich riffs off classic verité cinema to craft a contemporary portrait of Métis women net fishing in Northern Alberta.

CREE CODE TALKER reveals the role of Canadian Cree code talker Charles 'Checker' Tomkins during the Second World War. Digging deep into the US archives it depicts the true story of Charles' involvement with the US Air Force and the development of the code talkers communication system, which was used to transmit crucial military communications, using the Cree language as a vital secret weapon in combat.

A meditation on memory and perseverance, this short film follows 75-year-old South Williamsburg resident Álvaro Brandon on his daily route to feed 40 stray cats in his neighborhood.

Follows three aspiring Indigenous hip-hop artists on their challenging journey to success.

Eastern Shoshone medical student Jenna Murray spent summers on the Wind River Indian Reservation helping her grandpa in any way she could. When he suddenly dies, she must find a way to heal before realizing her dream of a life in medicine.

Crash-landed alien Harry takes on the identity of a small-town Colorado doctor. Arriving with a secret mission, he starts off living a simple life…but things get a bit rocky when he’s roped into solving a local murder and realizes he needs to assimilate into his new world. As he does, he begins to wrestle with the moral dilemma of his mission and asking the big life questions like: “Are human beings worth saving?” and “Why do they fold their pizza before eating it?”

Farm Crime is a true crime documentary series exploring the largely unseen dark side of Canada’s agriculture industry. Each episode examines a case that wouldn’t typically make the front page. Instead of kidnappings, cold cases and serial killers, the series examines the fascinating, lesser-known incidents that unfold in the margins – the fields, farms and unassuming small towns that dot the Canadian countryside. Rare sheep gone missing. Potatoes sabotaged with sewing needles. A multi-million-dollar pigeon breeding Ponzi scheme. These are farm crimes, and they exact a real toll on rural victims who don’t always get their due. Farm Crime approaches these stories with respectful curiosity, focusing on the people at the centre of the incidents, seeking answers, closure and justice.