Grand National

Co-directors Hubert Caron-Guay and Serge-Olivier Rondeau follow migrant workers through the steps in the hiring process of a community-based employment assistance organization. The filmmakers highlight the migrants’ difficult path by capturing conversations between the future employees and the recruiters. Through images shot on a body camera and a minimalist observational approach, the film exposes harsh and poignant realities. It draws parallels between the changing of the seasons and the cycle of the cattle industry that begins with animals being raised and cared for at a ranch and ends with them being sent to the abattoir grimly looming in the background. Ressources is a sobering and thought-provoking work that gives a voice to those who are at the heart of the food system that sustains this country.

The Inheritors offers an intimately arresting observation of the daily life of a colony of ring-billed gulls which nest alongside Canada’s largest landfill to feed their young. Alternating between the perspectives of prey and predator, we follow these unwanted creatures through a full breeding season as they become the targets of invasive data collection, then of harsh deterrence measures using the age-old art of falconry. With sound and cinematography that lets the birds speak for themselves, The Inheritors is a sensory experience which invites us to contemplate new ways of living and dying on a planet haunted by mass consumption and pollution. A foretelling of the ecologies of our future.

Olivier and Alex, two jaded teenagers, wander without purpose in a nightly suburb. In preparation of a debauchery evening, they get wasted, smoke some joints and talk about sex. Their conversation drifting, they sink into a night of errancy and disinhibition under the music of neons, motors and distant barking. A sensible and sincere look on a confused and reflective adolescence.