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
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A mysterious tiger walks through the forest, barely revealing itself, save for a few rare and magical glimpses. This allegorical fiction begins Pallavi Paul’s description of systemic police violence in Delhi, India, based on events suppressed from official history.
This panel is specifically built for filmmakers working in children’s programming. Join this informative discussion with CBC to learn how to break into and develop a career in the field in a way that can create a better future for kids.
Damascus Dreams is a reflexive documentary essay presented in a series of sections framed by voiceovers of Serri and her father. The film explores and interrogates the fraught notions of dreams, and memories of “home,” moving loosely through old video footage of the family home in Syria, interviews with Syrians who had to leave or flee because of the civil war, conversations between Serri and her father, and poetic, dreamlike sequences.
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is a unique showcase of contemporary Asian cinema and work from Asia and the Asian diaspora. Works include films and videos by artists in Canada, the U.S., Asia and all over the world. As Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival, Reel Asian provides a public forum for Asian media artists and their work, and fuels the growing appreciation for Asian cinema in Canada.
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