Canada199745 minEnglishDocumentary
Spanning over a decade from 1984 to 1996, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas is a portrait of Jeffrey Thomas, a self-described “Urban Iroquois” photographer, exploring the influences on his life that led him to his career. The work of Edward Curtis, an American photographer from the turn of the century, forced Thomas to closely examine how Indigenous Peoples had been photographed in the past. Starting the film as a foreign student in 1984, Kazimi begins to unravel the hidden history of the land that he has chosen as his home.
Certificate of Merit, Golden Gate Awards, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1998
Nominee, Best Short Documentary, Genie Awards, 1997
Nominee, Best Arts Documentary, Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, 1998
Ali Kazimi
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.
10 Nov, 2021
to 19 Nov, 2021
GA
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.
Mi-yeon seems to be living the perfect life as a choirmaster and the wife of a successful man. In comparison, her sisters Hee-sook and Mi-ok seem to be miserable, making Mi-yeon frustrated. But in the shadow behind her perfect smile, Mi-yeon’s also suffering from the three sisters’ shared childhood trauma that they’ve yet to come to terms with.
The shorts in this program include works screened two decades ago at Desh Pardesh, as well as films made last year by a cohort of South Asian and Indo Caribbean emerging filmmakers who participated in Inside Out Festival’s Short Film Lab.
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, Asian diasporic, and Asian Canadian 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.
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