A Quiet Girl
DIRECTOR: Adrian Wills • Canada • 86 minutes
Content Warning: adoption, family separation
In this deeply moving feature documentary, adopted Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills pieces together his complex birth origins in Newfoundland. Wills spends over two years in search of answers, revealing disquieting parallels between his own life and that of the birth mother he never knew. What begins as an urgent search for identity transforms the meaning of family, the filmmaker’s place in the world, and along the way, the voice of his birth mother, the 'quiet girl’.
Boat People
DIRECTOR: Thao Lam, Kjell Boersma • Canada • 10 minutes
A short but powerful look at survival and the lasting impacts of history on human lives. Based on the widely celebrated storybook The Paper Boat from Toronto children's author and illustrator Thao Lam. As a child, Thao's mother would save ants from drowning, and later, in a twist of fate, ants helped guide her family to safety during their escape from Vietnam across the South China Sea.
