this river

Good Citizen: Betty Baker is a tongue-in-cheek mystery, full of unexpected twists. It features Betty, a civic-minded housewife who inhabits a cartoonish, 2-D, 1950s-inspired world, replete with narrow-minded peril. The story begins when Prince Philip goes missing and Betty finds a clue that leads her on a thrilling chase from her neighbour’s trash, to a strangely exciting all-girls bar, to the local chapter of 100% Women. Accompanied by the musical stylings of Marilyn Lerner, this frolicking satire irreverently unravels right-wing family values.

Shoal Lake 40 women talk about their struggles, and those of their parents and grandparents, in trying to raise their families in a hazardous state of enforced isolation. Everyone in the community has a harrowing story of a loved one falling through the ice while trying to get across the lake, with pregnant women and new mothers fearing for their babies and having no choice but to make the trek in dangerous conditions. The film shows the key role of the community’s women in demanding funding for the road from three levels of government, and how their reconnection to culture and ceremony give them the strength to keep going.

disobedience is the visually lush journey of a mother on the lam. Warned by her three-year old son to "never go down to the end of the town", she nonetheless ventures far beyond the confines of home, heterosexuality, and the physical world. In punishment for her infatuation with an operatic Valkyrie, she is arrested, interned, stolen by pirates, and x-rayed by a book-eating bull-dyke. She loses her eye (and her way home), but in the end receives the gift of self.

Lesbian National Parks and Services' Endangered Species are a series of public service announcements, created by the indefatigable Lesbian Rangers, who serve the lesbian wilds from dawn to dusk and well beyond.

Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature follows the intrepid Lesbian Rangers as they patrol, educate, and illustrate lesbian survival skills. This documentary about the Force archly parodies the so-called objectivity of educational films, while playfully recasting the wilds from a lesbian perspective, calling into question prevalent notions of nature and normalcy.

WaaPaKe is a story about resilience, love and transformation. Examined through an Indigenous lens, the stories of residential school Survivor-Warriors and their families offer an understanding of both intergenerational trauma and healing. We are taken to a studio set-up in front of a green screen. Through compassionate, candid conversations, Jules Koostatchin shares interviews with five individuals, family and friends, that all directly or indirectly experienced intergenerational trauma.

Doubting details of her mother’s deathbed story, a skeptical daughter drags her brother on a genealogical goose chase through the Canadian prairies to the remote Icelandic highland. Determined to prove her mother spun tall tales, Erika delves into a basement full of file boxes only to find that family history triggers her own obsessive curiosity. Holed up with stacks of diaries, letters and pictures, Erika becomes spellbound by her increasing sense of belonging to an unfolding story.