Movies: Family history

Historically, the queer community has not been portrayed in mainstream culture as being capable of protecting children and young people. Yet my uncle Ricardo, himself an openly gay man, was the ultimate guardian of my childhood....

To open a photographs box is to travel through past and present, thinking about the future....

Charlene White embarks on a deeply personal journey to uncover the roots of her connection to the British Empire in a bid to find out if we can ever truly emerge from its shadow. Charlene travels across Britain and Jamaica on a genealogical journey t...

A portrait of Chicagoland ICU nurse Jeanette Alvarez-Basem captured through the perspective of her son Ben Basem. Between her night shifts and Illinois Nurses Association union meetings, Jeanette navigates what it means to be a nurse and a human duri...

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The film consists of video tapes made by the filmmaker’s father documenting daily scenes of family life, family celebrations, and holidays over the course of fifteen years. The tapes are a mixture of the personal and the political – the father was po...

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If your family photographs could speak, what stories would they share? Interweaving interviews with family artefacts, 'My Lovely Grandma' is an exploration of my maternal family history from the perspective of Molly and the woman she was before she b...

At the end of the 1960s, Vanesa’s parents fled the Franco-regime’s deep poverty to pursue their dream in the Netherlands. Working their blue-collar jobs for hours and hours, for over 45 years, their purpose was to return to Spain wealthy and comforta...

Filmmaker Helena de Llanos, who lives in the chaotic house, full of memories and treasures, where her grandfather, Fernando Fernán Gómez (1921-2007), legendary writer, actor and director; and his wife, the actress and writer Emma Cohen (1946-2016), s...

In Caribou in the Archive, rustic VHS home video of a Cree woman hunting caribou in the 1990s is combined with NFB archival film footage of northern Manitoba from the 1950s. In this experimental film, the difference between homemade video and officia...

Emma reviews old tapes on VHS, which show faded family memories of those distant 80s, when she was still a child. While recalling the trips to the coast and the children's laughter, she tries to recompose pieces of a story that he never fully underst...

Fear and fascination arise in Muriel Grey when she remembers the figure of her father, who passed away when she was still very young. Thirty years after his death, Muriel will tell us the story of José Carlos Grey, a Black Holocaust survivor, freedom...

In 1936, the Kiel dentist Dr. Rudolf Schultz bought a film camera to capture the development of his son Dieter. Over the years, many film rolls were exposed - they all tell much more than just the story of this one person, they also bear witness to t...

Revolves around a dining table and its purpose within the house....

After 21 years I return to my city of birth in order to find out what would have occured to my family if we hadn't fled the war....

A captivating and personal detective story that uncovers the truth behind the childhood of Michaël Prazan's father, who escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1942 thanks to the efforts of a female smuggler with mysterious motivations....

A man wanders around the mountains with a bleeding leg, holding a rifle in his hand. Seemingly a fugitive, he runs from as-yet unknown pursuers, but he also seems to be following somebody who has already walked the same path. As he hides in a seclude...

Through the eyes of grandmother Rumidjah, a poor old Christian woman living in the slums of Jakarta, we see the economical changing society of Indonesia and the influence of globalization reflected in the life of her juvenile granddaughter Tari and h...