If there’s one festival in Canada that I really want to get back to, it’s the Available Light Film Festival. Kicking off last night with the double bill of the documentaries Northlore and Saturday, ALFF boasts a distinct local flavour while offering the best films on the circuit from Canada and around the world. The sled dogs mushing through Whitehorse and gargantuan ravens cackling near the coffeehouses ensure that one’s always entertained between the screenings.
This year’s ALFF includes festival circuit highlights like Union, A New Kind of Wilderness, Curl Power, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, and 7 Beats Per Minute, along with an anniversary screening of All the Time in the World—an all-timer doc about life up north and escaping the grind of urban life, something that wonderfully reflects ALFF’s relaxed pace and community vibe. Doc fans can also catch award season contenders like Oscar nominee No Other Land and the Ontario Place doc Your Tomorrow, which is one of three films vying for the $50,000 Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. The festival closes on February 16 with the critically acclaimed drama All We Imagine as Light, a slice of life film set in Mumbai that sees director Payal Kapadia draw upon her documentary roots with a poet’s eye.
Here are 10 highlights on the documentary front at this year’s Available Light Film Festival.
Northlore: A Co-Production Case Study
Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025 at 3:30 pm | Old Fire Hall
ALFF opened its 2025 festival with Northlore, a thoughtful animated doc hybrid about the ineffable pull people that experience in the wilderness. Adventurers gather around an animated fire and share stories about moments in which they interacted with animals in northern nature. The film mixes documentary elements—conventional interviews and vérité shots in the wild—with animated sequences that conjure the animal encounters. One story includes mountaineer Michael Code who saved a goose that was lost amid a snowstorm, while another sees Elisabeth Pilon and friends on a canoe expedition hunted and saved by a wolf, and Gary Sidney Johnson shares how his first moose hunt taught him to understand consent and respect among animals. The festival continues the conversation in its industry programming as co-directors Melaina Sheldon and David Hamelin and NFB producer Shirley Vercruysse tell how Fireside Films came to co-produce the film with the National Film Board of Canada, CBC, and Northwestel Community TV, and pull various storytelling tools together.
Documentary Panel
Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025 at 9:30 am | Old Fire Hall
A highlight for me when attending the Available Light Film Festival was the industry side, as it’s a great chance to encounter faces known only by email. The documentary ticket this year brings four directors together to discuss their processes and how they navigate the ever-changing field of non-fiction. The panel includes Jessica Hall (whose Saturday screened on opening night), Tova Krentzman (Fire Tower), Graeme Mathieson (Play It Loud!), and Charles Wilkinson (Talk About Lonely) in a panel moderated by Brenda Lieberman of the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
Fire Tower
Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 12:00 pm | Yukon Theatre
At highlight from the North at Hot Docs this year, Fire Tower offers a portrait of the watchful eyes protecting Canada’s forests and all who dwell in or around them. Director Tova Krentzman introduces audiences to a handful of lookouts where labourers choose an isolated lifestyle that brings challenges and rewards. It’s a timely portrait on the heels of the fires that devastated California, sounding the alarm to preserve the watchful eyes as the number of lookouts is in decline even though the incendiary effects of climate change are on the rise. “Krentzman observes the daily labours of the lookouts as they share their duties and gab about isolation. One perk of the solo job is that these characters prove very talkative,” I wrote in POV’s review of Fire Tower at Hot Docs. “It’s evident that Krentzman is a welcome dose of human contact. Everyone has lots to say. They reveal character traits to show that it indeed takes a certain type to thrive in this job.” Fire Tower screens with the short doc The Medzih Story: Restoring a Caribou Landscape about an Indigenous community in Treaty 8 Territory working to stabilize the local wildlife.
Talk About Lonely
Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 3:00 pm | Yukon Arts Centre
Filmmakers Charles Wilkinson and Tina Schliessler are favourites in the Canadian festival circuit for their documentaries that look to the environment. Films like Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World and Oil Sands Karaoke have found acclaim with critics and audiences alike as they offer engaging case studies about the impact of resource extraction and landscapes worth preserving. Their latest film, Talk About Lonely, has its world premiered at ALFF and marks something of a departure by considering a different epidemic: loneliness. The doc explores the rise and impact of isolation in the COVID era as people shift to work-from-home plans and find communities on their phones with dwindling encounters IRL. The festival offers an ideal gathering place to revisit this idea of community, since there’s nothing quite like taking in a movie with a packed crowd.
Old Crow: A Philosophy
Monday, February 10, 2025 at 6:00 pm | Yukon Arts Centre
The effects of climate change inspire the northern community of Old Crow to look to the past in order to save the town’s future. Directors Erika Tizya-Tramm and Daniel Janke observe how the community draws upon the wisdom of elders to learn about sustainable practices that fell by the wayside with settler-forced reliance on non-renewable energy. The community decides it’s time to do away with the noisy generator that grinds 24/7 and adds an irritable inflection to a man-made problem. However, with some spirited conversations that emphasize intergenerational collaboration, the community pitches in by recognizing that if humans made the problem, they can drive the solution. Old Crow: A Philosophy chronicles the massive endeavour to fuel the community through solar power as Old Crow develops the largest panel installation in the north. The doc smartly reminds us to listen to Earth and work in harmony with its natural fuels, rather than exploit them. Old Crow: A Philosophy screens with the short doc Shaping Out Future about the creation of a 40 foot totem pole in a B.C. jail. (Quite the tall tale!)
Play it Loud!
Monday, February 10, 2025 at 8:30 pm | Yukon Arts Centre
Every festival needs at least one music doc to get audiences jamming in the seats. This time, Play It Loud! turns the theatre’s speakers up to 11 with its portrait of Jamaican-Canadian singer Jay Douglas. The film tells the story of how Douglas became “the godfather of Toronto soul” and was part of a community movement as island rhythms united Torontonians as part of a cultural migration. Play It Loud! continues director Graeme Mathieson’s exploration of the roots of Toronto’s reggae scene, which he previously considered in the five-part documentary series Sounds & Pressures. This story also boasts a great choice with which to mark Black History Month and get into a groove while learning about the collective history united through music. Douglas will be in attendance along with the filmmakers.
So Surreal: Behind the Masks
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 6:00 pm | Yukon Theatre
So Surreal: Behind the Masks offers an artful consideration of the repatriation of stolen work. Director Neil Diamond plays host in this doc co-directed by Joanne Robertson that considers the hunt for and the repatriation of Indigenous masks. There’s a novel twist, though, as Diamond discovers that the Yup’ik masks that fuel his quest were actually adored and coveted by artists in the Surrealist movement. What follows is an offbeat odyssey through art history and cultural appropriation, but also a fascinating exploration of cultural exchange and the power dynamics entailed within the art market. Diamond pulls it all of nicely with his signature laid-back approach that invites people into the conversation for a collective lesson in art history. “Even the Kwakwaka’wakw masks were never displayed except in ceremony,” Diamond told POV’s Marc Glassman in an interview. “As soon as the potlatch ceremony was over, they were put away in boxes, and they weren’t taken out again until the next ceremony was held. A very interesting thing I learned, and I knew this from my own culture, the Cree, is that there’s no word for art. Most native languages don’t have a word for art.”
The Stand
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 at 8:30 pm | Yukon Arts Centre
Haida filmmaker Christopher Auchter makes his feature directorial debut after helming acclaimed shorts like Now Is the Time. This NFB doc offers an archival portrait of a fateful fall day in 1985 when the Haida people erected a blockade on Lyell Island. Their act of protest sought to end a century of colonial rule that had stripped the land of its resources and nearly decimated Haida communities along with their language and culture. This story of land defenders revisits the stand-offs between figures like television pundit Jack Webster and Haida leader Miles Richardson as Auchter observes how a people fought to survive after nearly being wiped out. The film finds contemporary parallels in which the stand continues to this day. “Auchter’s film shows how cameras quickly descended upon Haida Gwaii to capture the standoff between the Haida people and the loggers,” I wrote while reviewing the doc at VIFF. “The cameras can’t help but take in the beautiful lush greenery of Haida Gwaii that the protesters defend. But, in turn, they also can’t ignore how brutally the logging ravages, scars, and devastates the landscape.”
Okurimono
Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 3:00 pm | Yukon Theatre
A woman named Nuriko returns to her native Nagasaki, Japan after years of living in Montreal. She’s back home to settle the affairs of her late mother, who passed following a hard life wracked with survivor’s guilt after she was spared when the atomic bomb dropped on the city in 1945. Noriko learns that her mother carried additional stigma as a “hibakusha.” The term connotes a sense of shame, as if survivors’ were tainted by living through the searing blast. Nuriko reconsiders her mother’s life as she wanders around Nagasaki and explores the ghosts that continue to haunt the land where she grew up. “Director Laurence Lévèsque finds the right balance between gaining intimacy and keeping a respectful distance from Noriko,” I wrote while reviewing the film at Hot Docs. “When her storyteller needs room to breathe, she provides space, but the camera-subject proximity proves quietly compelling. Okurimono is a poetic and deeply affecting consideration of the weight of secrets and the pain of never knowing one’s parents until their gone.”
There, There
Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 4:00 pm | Yukon Theatre
After her breakthrough hybrid film Murmur, Heather Young returns to the screen with There, There. After exploring one woman’s efforts to escape loneliness by surrounding herself with dogs, Young explores the lives of two women in search of comfort: an elderly woman with dementia and her pregnant caregiver. Although There, There is more of a traditionally scripted drama than the art-imitating-life twist of Murmur, it’s worth a look for audiences eager to see more from one of the most interesting new voices in Canadian film. The film’s had surprisingly limited play after Murmur hit pretty much every stop on the Canadian festival circuit, if anyone needs more incentive to make the trip up North.
