Family relationships take the spotlight during this year's Reel Asian International Film Festival
CBC
The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday evening with the opening film The Queen of My Dreams, the debut feature film by Canadian filmmaker Fawzia Mirza.
The Queen of My Dreams tells the story of a young queer Canadian woman (Amrit Kaur) and her relationship to her Pakistani Muslim mother in the wake of her father's sudden death, borrowing from the colourful imagery of Bollywood musicals, for which the two women have a shared love. The film will be released in early 2024.
This year's Reel Asian festival includes a number of films that explore family relationships and intergenerational dynamics through genre cinema, according to Ariam Collier, artistic director at the Reel Asian festival.
"We're just noticing how much Asian Canadian film is really rising and the storytelling is just getting better and better," Collier told CBC News.
Programmer Mariam Zaidi noted, "There is, in a really beautiful way, a great representation of Pakistani Muslim films this year which I'm really proud of." Zaidi works primarily with South Asian and West Asian films.
CBC News has a preview of films screening at this year's Reel Asian film festival in Toronto. The full schedule is available here.
A documentary in which Sri Lankan British filmmaker Chloe Abrahams' turns the camera on herself, exploring familial identity through her relationship with her mother and grandmother.
A period drama set during Japan's Edo era, the film follows a young woman living in a tenement house as she develops a fascination with a "manure man" who collects excrement to sell to farmers.
A struggling actor who spends his free time making fishing videos to post on his popular YouTube channel has a chance meeting with a successful actress and a director in this South Korean drama with a sense of humour.
In this Pakistani-Canadian supernatural horror film that Pakistan has put forward as its Oscar submission, a widow and her medical student daughter are haunted by insidious spirits from their traumatic past.
A Japanese time loop comedy in which the staff and guests of a charming riverside inn near Kyoto begin to relive the same two-minute cycle over and over.
A documentary film that follows Toronto social collective The Good Guise, a group of racialized male artists, as they explore a complicated relationship with masculinity.
Lebanese-American filmmaker Jude Chehab explores family secrets in this documentary about a secret matriarchal religious order to which the women in her family have pledged allegiance for generations.
A character study that blurs the lines between documentary, mystery and thriller, the film follows Taiwanese immigrant and Florida resident Jerry Hsu, a family man working to clear his name after a serious accusation by Chinese police.