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Award-winning Canadian director, Christy Garland, is premiering her third feature documentary at Hot Docs, North America's largest documentary festival, in Toronto this week. Garland is well known for her award-winning documentary, The Bastard Sings the Sweetest Song. However, Cheer Up proves to be a more light-hearted film than her earlier features. 

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A good story allows you to walk a mile in another's shoes, feel the stretch of their lives, visit their humanity.

The motto of the city of Borlänge in Sweden is "Nice Folk!" Like "Friendly Manitoba," it is a declaration of intent as well as a proclamation.

Rebels With a Cause is a four-day-long politically minded and socially conscious film festival co-ordinated by members of the York University community that took place on campus last week. I had the opportunity to view some experimental shorts from the “FAG Selects” series curated in collaboration with FAG: Feminist Art Gallery. 

Operation Peter Pan, the Estela Bravo documentary screening at the CineCuba film festival, tells the story of the "airlift" of 14,000 children from Cuba at the height of the Cold War. In 1961 and 1962 these children were flown out of Cuba, ostensibly to save them from communist indoctrination. Some never saw their families again. Many never saw Cuba again.

Though the justification for the actual Operation Peter Pan was the protection of children and parental rights, in reality it destroyed both.

In between the dazed superstars, American wannabe blockbusters and the Canadian red carpets of the Toronto International Film Festival, a heartening chink in the mainstream discourse emerged. It was the Reel Palestine panel on September 9, 2013 at the University of Toronto's Innis Town Hall. Moderated by Rasha Salti, curator, writer and TIFF Programmer for African and Middle Eastern Cinema, the panel included Hany Abu-Asad (dir. Omar, Paradise Now, Rana's Wedding), Mais Darwazah (dir. My Love Awaits Me by the Sea), Rani Massalha (dir. Giraffada; TPFF 2013: Elvis of Nazareth).

CaribbeanTales is a festival of immense scope: it lasts over a month and showcases the best of what the entire Caribbean has to offer for the film industry, including the innovative CaribbeanTales-TV.

With all the hype surrounding TIFF it might be hard to remember that there are other opportunities to see amazing film in Toronto. At FFIT, we are here to remind you! CaribbeanTales is a huge festival that began in August and will continue until this Saturday, September 14. It takes place mostly at the CNE, but also at various locations around the city. Check out the schedule: some of the best films have yet to be screened.

The Parkdale Film & Video Showcase has been around in various forms since 1999. Now in its 15th year, Rebecca Gruihn of the Parkdale Beauty Pageant Society is curating the program with new meaning.

Parkdale is a small neighbourhood nestled in and around perpendicular streets Queen West and Roncesvalles Avenue, notorious for being a rough area to live. Festival programmer Rebecca Gruihn emphasizes that this reputation is a “hangover” from years ago, and that a big part of the festival itself is to assert the Parkdale community as a stable, vibrant, and prosperous part of the city.

Tenchi: The Samurai Astronomer is a film by the Japanese Academy Award winning director Yojiro Takita, and was the selection for the opening of the Toronto Japanese Film Festival.  

This film is ultimately a coming-of-age tale that follows Santetsu Yasui’s (Junichi Okada) evolution from a clumsy, unreliably absent-minded Go-player with a love of mathematics, into a dependable and honourable mathematician, astronomer, and inventor of the Jokyo calendar.

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