NorthwestFest International Documentary Film Festival 2021
Online May 6-16, 2021

*Please note: All films are geo-locked for viewing within Alberta only.

All films are available to stream May 6th at 12:01 am to May 16th at 11:59 pm, and are available to stream for 48hrs from the time you press play on a title.

For more information, please click here.

 

The Magnitude of All Things | Jennifer Abbott | 2020 | 85 min

When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. Abbott’s new documentary The Magnitude of All Things draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief—both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.

For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action.

For tickets, please click here.

 

Stateless | Michèle Stephenson | 2020 | 95 min 30 s

In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, on the basis of anti-black racism. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929, rendering more than 200,000 people stateless. Director Michèle Stephenson’s new documentary follows the grassroots campaign of a young attorney named Rosa Iris, as she challenges electoral corruption and fights to protect the right to citizenship for all people.

For tickets, please click here.  

 

The Forbidden Reel | Ariel Nasr | 2019 | 119 min

Driven to create amidst war and chaos, Afghan filmmakers gave birth to an extraordinary national cinema. Driven to destroy, Taliban extremists set out to torch that legacy. Marvelling in the beauty and fragile power of movies, Afghan-Canadian director Ariel Nasr crafts a thrilling and utterly original story of modern Afghanistan.

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Someone Like Me | Sean Horlor & Steve J. Adams | 2021 | 80 min

In Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams’ feature doc Someone Like Me, Drake, a young gay man from Uganda, leaves behind everything he knows to attain the universal freedoms everyone deserves: to be who he is and love whomever he chooses without fear of discrimination, persecution, or violence. A group of queer strangers unite to resettle Drake in Vancouver, but they are tasked with a year-long commitment to someone they’ve never met, and struggle with the challenging conditions of this support. Together, Drake and his sponsors embark on an emotional journey in search of personal freedom, revealing how in a world where one must constantly fight for the right to exist, survival itself becomes a victory.

For tickets, please click here.