5 program picks
Rosie (Dir. Gail Maurice)
After a sold-out premiere at TIFF, Rosie returns to image+nation for the festival’s opening night. Inspired by Maurice’s experiences growing up queer and Indigenous in the 1980s, the film is set on the streets of Montreal as a young girl grapples with her mother’s death and discovers the resilience and hope of her newfound family. With an incredible soundtrack and colourful aesthetic, the film promises to make you laugh and cry.
High School (Dir. Clea Duvall)
Inspired by the coming of age of Tegan and Sara,
High School is a new original TV series brought to the screen by Clea Duvall ( But, I’m a Cheerleader!). Inspired by their memoir of the same name, the show is set in the 1990s when Tegan and Sara first started performing together at the age of 15. The film deals with being queer and the trials and tribulations of working and living with a sibling and finding your place in the world.
Stop-Zemlia (Dir. Kateryna Gornostai)
Screening as part of the spotlight on Ukraine, with guest curator Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival, Stop-Zemlia won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. As it blurs the line between documentary and fiction, Gornostai’s feature debut focuses on young people navigating growing up in Ukraine during their last year of high school. Radical and authentic, Stop-Zemlia captures the bewildering strangeness of adolescence with sincerity and sensitivity.
My Father Is My Mother’s Brother (Dir. Vadym Ilkov)
Also screening as part of the Ukrainian Spotlight, My Father Is My Mother’s Brother is a documentary portrait of artist/singer Tolik, his sister Anya and his niece Katya, whose struggles through daily life are filled with love, soul searching, loneliness and illness.
This Place (Dir. V.T. Nayani)
Nayani’s feature debut, starring Devery Jacobs ( Reservation Dogs) and Priya Guns, is a queer love story about two young women living in Toronto and dealing with difficult family questions. With dialogue in Mohawk, Persian, Tamil, French and English, This Place represents the diversity of the Canadian urban experience as it examines the joys and challenges of holding onto your culture and paving your own path.