2021. Muslim women are disconcerting, intriguing, polarizing—and straitjacketed by conflations of ideas in front-page stories. While the media tend to portray them as submissive and silenced, filmmaker Saïda Ouchaou-Ozarowski has chosen to distance herself from that caricature, with which she does not identify. She sat down with six Muslim Canadian women eager to talk about what shapes their identities. The resulting documentary, In Full Voice, offers an intimate perspective on the journey of these women, who have a common desire to share their visions of Islam.
This 2023 award-winning documentary series Maisonneuve, directed by Jean-Martin Gagnon, was filmed in the years following an event that shook Collège de Maisonneuve in 2015—the arrest of students preparing to leave for Syria to join the Islamic State. The series highlights the importance, as well as the fragility, of living together in harmony in Quebec and explores cultural and racial issues.
In the 2020 documentary Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King dismantles North America’s colonial narrative to reveal the falsehoods and fictions known as “history.”
2020. Even at a frail 90, Martha Katz has an impish energy that remains undiminished. She chides grandson-filmmaker Daniel Schubert over his choice of shirt during a visit to her Los Angeles home, but there’s trauma beneath the humour. At 14, Martha and her family were torn from their village in Czechoslovakia and shipped to Auschwitz. A visit to a Holocaust museum ignites painful memories, including a haunting personal encounter with one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious figures. For Martha, however, the emphasis is on a tough but rewarding postwar life in Winnipeg, which she fondly recalls in this warm, intimate portrait of an unrelenting survivor.
2020. A young Chinese-Canadian couple is visiting family in Wuhan, epicentre of the virus, at the very moment the pandemic is declared. Interviewing his subjects in a novel socially distanced mode, director Weiye Su explores the culturally specific concept of Jia—an idea evoking family or home that acquires sharp new meaning during COVID times.
2024. Against the changing face of Toronto’s Little Jamaica, where she established some of the city’s landmark reggae record stores, singer Nana McLean challenges outdated stereotypes and establishes her reputation as the queen of Reggae in Canada.
