Let Us Be Seen

A short animated documentary featuring archival recordings of the filmmaker's Volga-German Great-Great-Grandmother, Mary Frank Lind, in which she recalls key memories of childhood—her father's windmill, warm rains, wolf sightings, bone trading, and her passion for carpentry, which broke gender norms but was supported by her father.

The only thing colder than a Canadian winter is Canadian bureaucracy (probably). Based on five real life stories, Romy Boutin St-Pierre and Joe Nadeau pay homage to the nation-wide stress headache of phone calls with the government in this surprising short.

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

Through a collection of video diary entries spanning more than a year, Pronouns in Bio delivers an offbeat and charming reflection on transness and identity. Part documentary, part video essay and part musical, the film follows director and star Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, a recently out transgender, autistic woman, as she navigates the first year of her transition. Note: Lucy uses the name Frankie during the film but has since started using the name Lucy.

This documentary portrays the way in which attacks against a twisted concept of “gender ideology” in four countries are being used to gain political power by right-wing conservative politicians supported by conservatives in the Catholic and evangelical churches.

Violeta leads a normal life in a well-off family, with loving parents, surrounded by everything the heart of an eleven-year-old girl might wish for. But she hasn’t always been the pretty girl she is today; she was born a boy. At age 6, she baffled her parents (the famous adult movie stars Nacho Vidal and Franceska Jaimes) when she told them she wanted to be called and dress as a girl. After the initial shock, they decided to give her all their support on the long and tough road that will lead to her becoming a woman someday. Violeta faces many challenges, medical (such as deciding whether or not to take hormone-blockers to stop the development of masculine features as soon as puberty kicks in) and legal (obtaining an ID card with her new name and gender). Later, she may consider getting a sex reassignment procedure, or the possibility of becoming a mother through adoption.

Shut Up and Sing is a documentary about the country band from Texas called the Dixie Chicks and how one tiny comment against President Bush dropped their number one hit off the charts and caused fans to hate them, destroy their CD’s, and protest at their concerts. A film about freedom of speech gone out of control and the three girls lives that were forever changed by a small anti-Bush comment

Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.

The story of the Northern Ireland Troubles through the unflinching testimony of two men who played key roles on opposite sides of that bloody conflict. Nearly ten years ago the two paramilitary leaders told their stories on condition that they could never be revealed while they were still alive. The stories told by the Irish Republican Army's Brendan Hughes and Ulster Volunteer Force's David Ervine tell us of the motivations of the participants, the planning of campaigns of violence, the misery of a hunger strike, the tracking and killing of informers and the duplicity that ended a conflict that had lasted too long. It is also a narrative of the fate of combatants when their wars are over.

A young teacher in Zurich in the 1950s falls in love with a transvestite star but is torn between his bourgeois existence and his commitment to homosexuality. He joins a gay organization that is eventually seen as the pioneer of gay emancipation in Europe.

An unconventional portrait of painter Frida Kahlo and photographer Tina Modotti. Simple in style but complex in its analysis, it explores the divergent themes and styles of two contemporary and radical women artists working in the upheaval of the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

A Biography documentary going behind the scenes of the hit show 'Glee,' featuring interviews with creators and a handful of cast members as well as never-before-told stories from its conceptual beginning through the casting process.

Quearborn & Perversion: An Early History of Lesbian & Gay Chicago (2009, 109 min) is a documentary on LGBTQ life in Chicago from 1934 to 1974. Moving from the speakeasys and Henry Gerber’s founding of the Society for Human Rights in the 1930s, to the underground social structure of the 1940s and 1950s, to the dawn of consciousness-raising entities such as the Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine Midwest in the 1960’s, and concluding with the emergence of the gay liberation movement with the first Pride March and opening of the first community center in the early 1970s.

Displaying the faces and voices of transgender youth, the documentary short shows the authenticity of queer and trans people living in Toronto, while simultaneously discussing the struggles for self-acceptance that people who do not conform to cisgender and heteronormative ideals of gender face. Andy Nguyen, trans director and film student, captures his trans friends in their natural state on 16mm film shot on a Bolex h16 camera. Accompanied by narration written and recited by Salem Rao, this film represents that trans people exist and this is what we look like. Regardless of the obvious everyday transphobia, trans people find community and uniqueness within each other and themselves.

A portrait of the lives of a disparate group of patrons and employees at an American watering hole today.