Wildhood

Audience Choice Award Winner

Two-spirit Mi’kmaw teenager Link (Phillip Lewitski) is just discovering — and asserting — his sexuality when his already volatile home life goes off the rails. His abusive father Arvin explodes after the cops bust Link and his half-brother Travis (Avery Winters-Anthony) for stealing scrap metal. When he finds out that his supposedly dead mother Sarah may be alive, Link sets fire to Arvin’s truck and flees with Travis. Sparks fly in a chance encounter with teen drifter Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), who shares Link’s Indigenous roots and offers to help find Sarah — but will Link’s (well-founded) mistrust of people ruin his potential new relationship and the group’s mission?

With echoes of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, Max’s experience is both terrifying and magical. He inhabits a landscape crawling with Jew-hunters, partisans and haunted by ghosts. Then everything changes when he meets another boy in hiding, Yanek (David Kohlsmith). Their extraordinary adventure culminates in the heroic rescue of a baby girl, but it comes at a tragic price. Based on the best-selling memoir by Canadian Holocaust survivor Maxwell Smart and inspired by the award-winning documentary Cheating Hitler: Surviving The Holocaust. 

107 mins
Canada, 2021
Dir. Bretten Hannam
Language: English, Mi’kmaq

The Music Video

Canadian Short Showcase Winner

In order to be in her older brother’s music video, Clara, a 13-year-old tomboy, agrees to undergo a radical change of style. She soon notices that this transformation changes her brother’s friend’s behaviour towards her.

13 mins 54 secs
Canada, 2020
Dir. Camille Poirier
Language: French

Barbara

Student Short Showcase Winner

A lone, crisis-hotline operator receives a distressing call during her graveyard shift.

5 mins 57s
Canada, 2021
Dir. Aidan Lesser
Language: English