TRUE NORTH

“This propulsive cinematic confrontation with Canada’s anti-Black racism explores the pivotal, yet often overlooked, Canadian civil rights movement. Filmmaker Michèle Stephenson (AMERICAN PROMISE; STATELESS; GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT) artfully weaves a haunting soundscape with dynamic archival footage and intimate new interviews, immersing us in Black life in 1960s Montreal. The film culminates in the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, where 200 students, many of them Haitian immigrants fleeing the Duvalier regime, occupied a ninth-floor computer lab at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) to protest blatant institutional bigotry. This rare footage feels hauntingly prescient against the backdrop of recent student protests, serving as a stark reminder that these cycles of resistance are deeply etched in our collective history. By shining a light on these unsung stories, Stephenson reframes the 1960s civil rights movement not as a strictly American phenomenon, but as a continent-wide, ongoing struggle for survival, justice, and dignity.” –FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

Preceded by: Dawn Wilkinson DANDELIONS 1995, 5 min, 16mm “In DANDELIONS, Dawn Wilkinson – a Black Canadian woman – bears witness to the experience of being made to feel like an outsider in one’s own home, in one’s own landscape. At one point, Wilkinson observes, ‘I’m Canadian…It’s popular enough to sell beer, but no one can define what it means. And yet they do, they define it every time they ask me where I’m from.’ DANDELIONS is a beautiful and eloquent film that deploys the techniques of a lyrical, interiorized cinema to lay bare the ways in which Western societies foster an idea of whiteness as ‘neutral’ and everything else as ‘other,’ and to illustrate the psychic toll on those who exist outside this construct.” –Jed Rapfogel, CINEASTE

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Michèle Stephenson will be here in person!

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