Canada, Philippines200226 minDocumentary

A documentary following members of the Toronto Filipinx Canadian community preparing for Fiesta.

Canada, PhilippinesEnglish and other languages with English subtitles

Presenting a collection of short and mid-length work from Romeo Candido's career.

Romeo Candido is a CSA winner and proud Filipino Canadian story teller with experience in film, television, theatre, documentary and advertising.  Recent credits include writing / directing a film for the NBA called SHORTY, directing on S29 of THIS HOUR HAS 22 MINUTES, directing two episodes of the upcoming CIRCUIT BREAKERS for Apple TV and writing an episode of the hit comedy SON OF A CRITCH.  He is currently the co-showrunner of S8 of popular dance series The Next Step for CBBC and YTV.  His ten part musical series TOPLINE, which he serves as creator, writer, director and composer premiered to rave reviews on CBC Gem March 31 2022.  His original musical PRISON DANCER will  have its world premiere as a stage musical at the Citadel Theatre in spring of 2023.

Canada, Philippines2006105 minutesEnglishDrama, Music

Inspired by age-old Filipino folklore, this frightening thriller is a chilling story about the resurfacing of dark family secrets. When word arrives that grandmother Lola has died, Johnny and his sister Anna travel back to the Philippines to learn that they’ve inherited the matriarch’s country estate. They begin to realize that not only is the farm haunted by Lola’s ghost, but also deeply connected to perilous supernatural forces.

With no way out, Johnny must call upon Lola’s legendary lessons to vanquish monsters and ultimately save his family from doom. Featuring an almost entirely Canadian cast, this modern-traditional horror flick breathes some fresh Filipino life into the genre.

– Heather Keung

Canada2022120 minEnglishCanadian PremiereDrama, Music

Romeo Candido’s latest musical foray Topline takes us into the world of topliners: the people who write the lyrics, melodies, and hooks for the industry’s biggest stars. Tala is a reclusive singer-songwriter whose alter ego is named Illisha. When Tala is discovered by and joins a hitmaking team of topliners, she must secretly follow her passion while dealing with her family’s grief over their mother’s passing. And in the process, Tala just might find her voice. Topline features many of Candido’s hallmarks: dramatic, funny, and touching, with an amazing soundtrack. This web series has something for everyone. Featuring emerging talent from across the Greater Toronto Area, the Topline cast will perform its songs live, for a one-of-a-kind experience. 

Directors Bio

Romeo Candido is a CSA winner and proud Filipino Canadian story teller with experience in film, television, theatre, documentary and advertising.  Recent credits include writing / directing a film for the NBA called SHORTY, directing on S29 of THIS HOUR HAS 22 MINUTES, directing two episodes of the upcoming CIRCUIT BREAKERS for Apple TV and writing an episode of the hit comedy SON OF A CRITCH.  He is currently the co-showrunner of S8 of popular dance series The Next Step for CBBC and YTV.  His ten part musical series TOPLINE, which he serves as creator, writer, director and composer premiered to rave reviews on CBC Gem March 31 2022.  His original musical PRISON DANCER will  have its world premiere as a stage musical at the Citadel Theatre in spring of 2023.

Challenging norms, paving the road, and telling fresh stories, our Canadian Spotlight Artist program is dedicated to a member of the dynamic and talented Asian Canadian film community. This program celebrates a selected artist by activating their journey, process, and future works.

Romeo Candido is a singular talent. A writer, director, and musician, his creative catalogue of work comprising musicals, horror, and comedy is a unique adventure. What else would you expect from the first Filipino born in Newfoundland? His genre-hopping career has been weaved into the fabric of Reel Asian, from his first feature film Lolo’s Child (1999) to the horror film Ang Pamana: The Inheritance (2007) to the bring-down-the-house live performance of the web musical Prison Dancer (2012) to his numerous short films in between. While we’ve recently seen exciting work from emerging Filipinx Canadian artists, Candido was an original. But like us, he’s far from done, as we feature Topline (2022) with a one-time-only live performance of his latest musical series.

Canada201677 minEnglishDocumentary

From a pile of deteriorating 16 mm home movies from 1936 to 1951, a moving story emerges of a Chinese American family, set against the backdrop of race and class in Chicago. Rescued from an online auction, the filmmaker’s quest to make sense of these home movies connects him with Irena Lum, the surviving daughter of the graphic artist and collector Silas Henry Fung. The retrieved footage offers an intimate and radically different visual perspective on the Chinese American community in Chicago—with a surprising feminist twist. 

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

Canada200487 minEnglish, Punjabi, Urdu with English subtitles

Continuous Journey is a complex tale of hope, despair, treachery, and tragedy. It is a revealing Canadian story with global ramifications, set in a time when the British Empire seemed omnipresent and its subjects were restless and seeking self-determination.

In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Sikh entrepreneur based in Singapore, chartered a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to carry Indian immigrants to Canada. On May 23, 1914, the ship arrived in Vancouver Harbour with 376 passengers aboard: 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus. Many of the men aboard were veterans of the British Indian Army, and believed that it was their right as British subjects to settle anywhere in the Empire they had fought to defend and expand. They were wrong…

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.