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03:15
Petals of Hope
Petals of Hope is a PSA showing the sufferings of women around the world. The film uses a red rose with petals falling to symbolize how the pain women experience has made them lose their beauty, hope, and dreams.
02:57
America: Love It Or Fix It: John McCain
He endured five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Perseverance helped him win the Republican nomination. From our presidential candidates video series: John McCain.
03:10
Hide and Seek
A short glimpse at the devastating effects land mines are still having on the world today and what Canada is doing about it.
03:03
Fuming
Two years into the Scottish smoking ban, a group of disgruntled smokers have their say.
03:29
Cubanos, Life and Death of a Revolution
Cubanos, a completely independent production, liberates itself from television convention to draw an impressionist portrait of the Cuban community. Sincere interviews and sequence shots reveal an identity fragmented by 48 years of dictatorship, a people struggling to leave the 20th century behind. While music may barely camouflage the misery and corruption in Cuba, the sounds of engines and commercial radio can’t mask the cultural gap between the island and the very active community in Miami. The main character, Catuey, a Cuban musician who has been living in Québec for a number of years, brings to his journey and his songs the image of an ideal Cuba hurt by the division in its people and the group-think that prevails in Miami. Confronted with the contradictions among his countrymen and his own demons, Catuey ends his odyssey drained and disappointed not to have found a simple path to reconciliation. The film steers clear of the pitfalls of sensationalist news, taking a more holistic approach to the identity issues the Cuban community will face upon the death of Fidel Castro. Yan Giroux has shot, edited and directed a film that uses strong framing and extended shots to transform the chaos of reality into a set of evocative signs. While Catuey and the interviewees try to define themselves both as individuals and as Cubans, one scene at a time, the camera paints a broader, more complex portrait of a people held prisoner by their history. The travel footage scans the day-to-day lives of Cubans in Cuba and Miami for vestiges of the revolutionary dream. Echoing each other throughout the film, the scenes explore the many facets of a culture that is developing differently on either side of the Straits of Florida. Precise camera and editing work create a setting of objects and sounds that subtly interact with the content of the interviews. Amidst Havana’s ruins, the interviewees’ faces are blurred to protect their identities, but this is no longer a formal constraint, becoming one more aesthetic symptom in the crumbling landscape of Cuban communism. By exploring the richness of cinematographic language, Cubanos goes beyond the documentary genre to become a road movie that takes us to the heart of Catuey's struggle. A faded flag flutters in the wind as a saw whines, far away. Catuey croons Cuba’s national anthem like a lullaby. The ambiguity between dream and nightmare is what defines this revolution, its romanticism tattered by disillusionment.
34:39
Greater - Defeating AIDS
Winner of the Documentary Award in the first Babelgum Online Film Festival. The defeat of AIDS in the Naguru and Kireka slums of Kampala (Uganda). This is billed as a non-documentary and, watching the way it pulls together the different stories of Ugandan women who are HIV positive, we soon realise that we’re seeing life there in a way we might not in the mainstream.
 

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