Up next on the regional festival circuit train: Reel Asian! The festival celebrates a milestone year in 2026 as it marks 30 years of Asian excellence, including a healthy industry component that helps to expand the footprint for Asian film by giving artists the tools they need to grow and mentor the next generation. The festival also bids adieu to outgoing executive director Deanna Wong, as she steps back after a long run leading Reel Asian through significant growth, COVID closures, and the funding challenges that rocked festivals in the aftermath of the pandemic. Kelly Liu will take over the position next year.
“I had left the festival for a bit, but when I came back in 2019, that was at the height of the Crazy Rich Asians phenomenon, and there was a lot of excitement about what the success of that film meant,” Wong told The Globe and Mail earlier this week about her run with the festival. “Have we arrived in the mainstream? But we also had this peak of DEI initiatives of creating film and television projects that’s now been waning. So what has remained this whole time is the need for the community to support each other in writing and directing stories that reflect their own experiences.”
Running Nov. 11 to 21, Reel Asian features a handful a bunch of short docs and a handful of features, while our summer editorial intern Nidhil Vohra makes his directorial debut in the festival’s Unsung Voices workshop!
There’s also a very fun “doc adjacent” film with The Bryce Lee Story about a cinephile teen’s effort to enter his high school film festival with the help of a little white lie about a famous “uncle” and the power of pivoting to documentary. The festival also screens a Toronto encore of Serville Poblete’s Sunburn, which won Best Canadian Feature at TIFF earlier this fall for its authentic portrait of urban life.
Check out the feature documentary highlights at Reel Asian 2026:
Ba’s Book
In the penultimate leg of our fall festival circuit coverage, Reel Asian kicks off with one of the most acclaimed Canadian docs on the tour: Ba’s Book. The hybrid film sees Duong creatively engage with her father’s story as she interprets his memoir through dramatic recreations. But there’s another tale behind the story, and Duong follows her father back to Vietnam as he traces his escape from the country during wartime, only to land in Iran on the cusp of revolution before fleeing again and starting in Canada. “Working with family intimately, like my dad, who is very strong-willed and opinionated is so hard,” Duong tells Alice Shih in our current issue. “I do want to include his opinions but not all. There’s a huge linguistic and cultural barrier between me and my family in Vietnam; but since we spent a lot of time together, we have gotten a lot closer throughout the process.” The film by Ashley Duong also closes RIDM later this month. (Please stay tuned for notes on that festival as events are covered in calendar order!)
The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony
Three young women thrive as part of the gymnastics team in Machar Colony, a densely populated port-side community on the outskirts of Karachi known for its busy fishing markets, in this upbeat documentary directed by Habiba Nosheen. The girls’ love for sport challenges the expectations that society has for them as family members and neighbours prefer they’d be readying for marriage. Yet the girls’ minds are on honing their core strength, landing the perfect vault, and finding balance as their story encounters the patriarchal dynamics that determine their fates and the cracks of statelessness in a society that fails to love them back. “If you want to understand girlhood in Pakistan, you need to understand this thing that they all have to deal with. And that, for me, makes the last girl standing even more powerful because it took a lot to get there,” Nosheen says in an interview with POV. “Nothing has been handed to her by the time she gets to that competition. She’s had to really fight not only her socioeconomic status, but with the expectation of girls, and early marriage, and society, and her statelessness, for her to make it to that stage becomes even more of a moment because you know how many girls dropped along the way for her to be there.”
Pinball
Having its Canadian documentary and one on the list that we’ve yet to see (but are looking forward to), Pinball from Naveen Chaubal shares the story of an Iraqi teen growing up in the USA. Now off to college, Yosef finds himself pinballing between the land he knows and the distant home he longs for as the documentary observes what it means to grow up displaced from the land of one’s birth and making sense of one’s identity in an adopted homeland that doesn’t welcome people who look like you. “The familiarity of the conversations between a father and son or a father and a daughter or a son and a mother, it felt so familiar and familial that it was just like, ‘Oh, there’s something here that needs to be shared,’” Chaubal told Deadline following the film’s premiere at True/False. “And here we [were] in Kentucky, in Louisville, and we often don’t see that as a backdrop. We often don’t see Indiana as a backdrop. So, it just felt like there was something urgent in that respect to tell that story.”
Film Club
A few issues back, Marc Glassman cited some key films throughout the history of the National Film Board of Canada that helped to shape the history of access, equity, and representation in Canadian cinema. Among the titles of note is Cyrus Sunder Singh’s 2001 documentary Film Club, which gets a 25th anniversary screening at Reel Asian. The film sees Singh remember his days joining a group of cinephiles at school to share their love for movies, but the collective also became an exercise in making sense of one’s identity in the Canadian mosaic as all the participants were children of immigrants. “An early success was Film Club (2001) by Sri Lankan- Indian-Canadian Cyrus Sundar Singh, a musician who morphed into a documentarian with this award-winning short, which looked at his grade-school class of budding cineastes to discover what happened to the first children of Trudeau’s embrace of multiculturalism,” writes Glassman. Singh and some of the Film Club participants will join Deanna Wong for a Q&A following the screening.
Reel Asian runs Nov. 11 to 21.
Please check your local listings for additional festivals, event screenings, and broadcast dates for films cited in this post.
