Tell Me All About My Body

Bringing the same insight and precision to her debut dramatic work as she did with her award-winning documentaries, Toronto’s Carol Nguyen immerses viewers in the intricate matrix that connects three generations of an immigrant family.

Aïcha, a 7-year-old black girl receives a drawing mocking her hair. With the help of her big sister, they will spend the evening trying to make her beautiful like her classmates. How far is she willing to go to be seen and accepted?

Currently, post pandemic, one in two young people show symptoms of anxiety and depression. The World Is Ours is a film that gives the opportunity to six Montreal teenage girls to leave their urban environment for the first time to take part in a nature canoe-camping expedition. By presenting their struggles and small victories, the film poetically and luminously embraces their vulnerability, emphasizing in broad strokes the power of female sisterhood and therapeutic intervention by nature. Using an intervention cinema approach and seeking to democratize access to the outdoors for marginalized communities, the production of the film took on the responsibility of defraying the costs of the expedition for these six young women.

Lila goes to her grandmother’s to spend the weekend. There, she meets her cousin Maxime with whom she has been very close since childhood. It’s during this weekend that an event will forever change the relationship between the two and tarnish Lila’s worldview.

While this film directly addresses an experience common to all mixed-race women, it delves more deeply into that of director Nadia Louis-Desmarchais. Born to a Haitian mother and an Italian-Quebecois father, the young woman raised in a white adoptive family examines the internalized and normalized racism that surrounds her. Her reflections on identity issues gradually combine with others related to maternal abandonment. Drawing on archives, testimonials, and stories of Black people, the director confronts family taboos, awkwardness, separations, and missed opportunities. A moving, introspective quest in which Nadia Louis-Desmarchais tries to piece together the puzzle of her identity and family.

Afro Canada is a documentary series that traces 400 years of Afro-descendant presence in Canada. This docuseries, rich in historical and social significance, will leave a lasting impact. By re-appropriating various narrative techniques, Afro Canada pays tribute to the collective memory of Afro-Canadians, whose history is marked by slavery, forced displacement of their bodies and families, and, above all, their resilience — an essential resilience for ensuring that future generations can live freely.