Zagros

A portrait of Hemela Pourafzal, the exuberant matriarch and owner of Byblos Le Petit Café, a staple Iranian restaurant nested in Montreal for more than 37 years, serving as a central meeting point for the Iranian diaspora and the local art scene. As Hemela reflects on the past eight decades of her adventurous life, we uncover her untold stories and that of Iranian women through the prism of her life.

The Seven Last Words sounds out the experiential states and rituals particular to humanity, based on seven themes expressed in an oratorio: forgiveness, hope, relation, abandonment, distress, triumph, and life after the death.

Like a Spiral is a dialogue between Beirut and five women, migrant domestic workers, under the Kafala system. Expressing their belonging to a society in collapse, the women's voices rise through the film's grainy images to denounce their stolen freedom with an inalienable thirst for existence. Their memories dance in the rhythm of oppression. Caught within life's spiral, they lift themselves up to not sink into oblivion.

“Hey, let’s go on a diet together.” As kids in a small Quebec town, Eisha and Seema were more than sisters, they were soul mates, and a joint diet offered a shared sense of purpose. But their carefree project would take a dark turn, pushing Eisha to the very brink of death. Consumed by anorexia, she found herself battling her own fragile body—stranded between childhood and adulthood. Decades later, she revisits her past in an exquisitely crafted work of auto-ethnography, evoking her unusual youth with aching lyricism. In addressing a tender love letter to the troubled girl she once was, she reaches contemporary audiences with a timely reflection on body image and self-acceptance.