Also marking Asian Heritage Month with special themed channel
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) last week announced two new documentaries from Yukon and British Columbia will be added to its streaming offerings on nfb.ca in May.
Starting May 16, filmmaker Jessica Hall’s short documentary Saturday explores the joyful, creative life of her sister, Katherine, who has an intellectual disability. The 13-minute film is “[a]n inspiring tribute to a daughter and mother’s close and supportive relationship,” an NFB press release says. Saturday has been screened at a number of Canadian festivals, including the Available Light Film Festival in Whitehorse, where it was filmed.
On May 26, the feature-length documentary Incandescence by Nova Ami and Velcrow Ripper will make its NFB streaming debut. This 105-minute film leads viewers to a new understanding of massive wildfires through an immersive cinematic experience that weaves on-the-ground footage with extraordinary stories of survival and adaptation. This spring, Incandescence played at sold-out screenings across British Columbia, and it has been selected for festivals in Canada and the U.S., including the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The doc will be shown in Montreal on Thursday, May 22 as part of the Hello Film! series at the NFB’s Alanis Obomsawin Theatre.
Also in May, the NFB is marking Asian Heritage Month will special programming on a dedicated themed channel.
“The NFB wants to highlight the importance of sharing the distinctive stories and important contributions of people from Asian communities across the country. This is all the more crucial in the wake of the terrible attack on Vancouver’s Filipino-Canadian community on April 26, Lapu-Lapu Day,” the NFB says in its press release.
The Asian-Canadian Perspectives channel features nearly 30 NFB animated films and documentaries that centre around Asian communities and stories told from Asian perspectives. The selection includes Eisha Marjara’s Am I the skinniest person you’ve ever seen?, which won the Betty Youson Award for Best Canadian Short Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 2024.
The NFB is also marking Mental Health Week (May 5-11) with a blog post from its French collection curator, Marc St-Pierre, that will explore animation filmmakers’ perspectives on the subject. “An Animated Journey into Mental Health” will draw on several animated films, including Zeb’s Spider by Alicia Eisen and Sophie Jarvis, The Great Malaise by Catherine Lepage, I Am Here by Eoin Duffy, The Head Vanishes by Franck Dion, Mystery of the Secret Room by Wanda Nolan, LOCA by Véronique Paquette, Lipsett Diaries by Theodore Ushev, and Animal Behaviour by Alison Snowden and David Fine.
Image courtesy of the NFB
