Ali Kazimi is Reel Asian’s Canadian Artist Spotlight in 2021. Appropriately for our 25th festival, the documentary filmmaker, media artist, activist, author, and educator has been a fixture in the Asian Canadian community, and we celebrate his over three decades of vital contributions to Canadian media. In 2019, Kazimi became the first Indo Canadian to receive the Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual and Media Arts award winner. His documentary and media-arts work deals with race, social justice, migration, and memory, and emphasizes essential connections across racialized communities, between personal and public, through past and present.
Born, raised, and educated in India, Kazimi came to Canada to study film production at York University in 1983. Two decades later, after receiving over two-dozen awards and honours as an independent filmmaker, Kazimi returned to York, where he is currently an associate professor in the cinema and media arts department.
Reel Asian is pleased to offer a sampling of Kazimi’s seminal documentary films, as well as a suite of talks that will give greater insight into his process, and a viewing of excerpts from new works in progress.
Inspired by his films’ spirit of friendship and collaboration, Reel Asian is presenting Kazimi’s with our friends and neighbours ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival, and South Asian Visual Arts Centre.
Still Indian? In Conversation
Jeffrey Thomas (Iroquois) | Ali Kazimi (Indo-Canadian)
November 10, 2021–November 19, 2021
Artists and friends Jeff Thomas and Ali Kazimi join Métis curator Rhéanne Chartrand and SAVAC executive director, Indu Vashist in conversation, reflecting on the film Shooting Indians and their collaboration, touching upon notions of cross-cultural intersectionality, time, and kinship.
Produced in collaboration by
SAVAC
Reel Asian International Film Festival
ImagineNative
10 Nov, 2021
to 19 Nov, 2021
No Article Found
No Article Found
No Article Found
No Article Found
Kea can’t make ends meet, even while working as a luau dancer, karaoke-bar hostess, and elementary school Hawaiian-language teacher. After a violent altercation with her boyfriend, Kea accidentally hits a homeless man with her car. Not wanting to involve the authorities, she decides to take care of the mysterious man herself.
Set up on a pre-arranged date by their old-fashioned Indian parents, Ravi (Karan Soni) and Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) seem to have nothing in common, which makes their first encounter comically awkward.
Monica (Sujata Day), a former spelling-bee champion, lives at home with her ailing mother and tutors young spelling-bee hopefuls whose parents hover around, in hopes that their children will follow in her footsteps. When she is offered a dream job in another city, she considers accepting it, until her estranged brother Sonny (Ritish Rajan) shows up unexpectedly, opening up old wounds and familial tensions.
Founded in Toronto in 1997, Reel Asian is Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival and a year-round cultural organization dedicated to championing Asian and Asian diasporic artists and storytellers. What began as a grassroots film festival has grown into a national platform supporting filmmakers and audiences through screenings, education, industry initiatives, artist development, and community programming presented across Toronto, the GTA, and online across Canada.
401 Richmond Street West, The Commons (Suite 448)
Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8 Canada
(416) 703 – 9333
info@reelasian.com
Charitable number: 870021383RR0001
