Films
Friday, February 13
Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story
Stage Play
Written and performed by Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg (in attendance)
Experience this brand-new comedic play from multiple award-winning FRINGE LEGENDS Alex Dallas (Horseface, Sensible Footwear) and Jimmy Hogg (The Potato King). Evie & Alfie is a romantic comedy, a love story. At once a hilarious examination of enduring relationships — the ties that bind us together — and a nostalgic photo album that shows us the lives led by the titular couple. We are introduced to the elderly retirees in their home, as they potter about making tea, bird-spotting and wondering whether Tuesday is in fact the day that the bins go out. Then, through a series of flashbacks, we see snippets of their lives — when they first met, a marriage proposal, their first foreign holiday, and birth of a child. As we bounce between the past and the present, we learn the full-extent of what it takes to make their relationship work. Genuinely hilarious and relatable, Evie & Alfie is a story full of wit, verve, and heart.
Folktales
Norway/USA, 2025, 106 min, Subtitled, Documentary
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Rated PG
Many students in Norway and other Nordic countries take a “gap year” after graduation and spend it at a folk high school. Folktales follows three teenagers attending the Pasvik Folkehøgskole in the remote Norwegian Arctic. Pasvik’s program includes dog sled training, hunting, and bushcraft. In the film, one of the dog-sledding teachers says that working with dogs “unlocks something inside a person”. Another teacher explains that our brains are confused by the modern world and technology and asserts that the program at Pasvik is designed to “wake up your Stone Age brain”. Folktales incorporates Norse legends as symbolized by unfurling red threads wrapping around tree branches, a connection with the past. Directors Ewing and Grady pay close attention to their student subjects, but the film also spends ample time photographing the beauty of the environment, including the frost, snow and amazing “nordlys” (northern lights) in the night sky. Trailer
Saturday, February 14
A Poet
Colombia, 2025, 120 min, Subtitled, Drama/Tragicomedy
Directed by Simón Mesa Soto
Rated 14A (nudity and coarse language)
This 2025 Cannes Film Festival prize winner is a darkly humorous character study in letting one’s long-lost creative dream drive every decision. Still clinging to the vision of being a celebrated poet, or at least one that will pay the bills, the main character Oscar (Umbeimar Rios) has had an existence of seemingly self-inflicted trials and tribulations, going through a perpetual mid-life crisis some decades after published work was praised early in his career. Colombian director and screenwriter, Simón Mesa Soto, discovered the first-time actor through his friend’s Facebook profile. Rios is a non-professional actor and high school philosophy teacher in real life, who is active in the arts, organizes a poetry festival and plays in a hard-rock band. Film critic Jordan Raup suggests this is “another updated telling of the Book of Job that finds an absurdly comic side to such afflictions… Oscar Restrepo may be hapless, but he isn’t completely hopeless.” Trailer
Aisha’s Story
Canada, 2025, 64 min, Subtitled, Documentary
Directed by Elizabeth Vibert (in attendance). Co-director Chen Wang
Unrated
"Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage.” Aisha Azzam and her husband started their family grain mill in Baqa’a refugee camp, Jordan, nearly 40 years ago. She treasures her role in safeguarding culture by milling the wheat and herbs essential to Palestinian cuisine. Through food, Aisha traces the story of Palestinian displacement and rebuilding family and community in exile. Harvesting, milling, cooking, and feasts ground the film's arc of displacement and steadfastness. Aisha teaches her grandchildren to use the grinding stone her grandparents carried with them when they were forced to flee in 1948. She cooks with her daughters “hand by hand,” although several are blind. In Aisha's words, “Food is what keeps us together as Palestinians.” Aisha’s story intimately captures the loss, beauty, and resistance that define Palestinian lives. The film had its World Premiere at Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival 2025 where it won the Audience Award for Mid-Length Documentary and was a Top 20 Audience Favourite. Trailer
The Ballad of Wallis Island
UK, 2025, 100 min, Comedy/Drama
Directed by James Griffiths
Rated PG
The Ballad of Wallis Island follows Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric lottery winner who lives alone on a fictional remote island off the coast of Wales, who dreams of getting his favourite musical group, McGwyer Mortimer, back together. His fantasy turns into reality when the bandmates accept his invitation to play a private show at his home, unbeknownst to each other. The duo, who haven't performed together in years and had a romantic history, arrive, but old resentments and unresolved feelings quickly surface, disrupting Charles's dream. As Charles, Key is a balance between adorable and annoying, adding subtle grace notes of grief to a comedic performance. The music for The Ballad of Wallis Island was written by actor Tom Basden (McGwyer), who also stars in the film alongside Carey Mulligan (Mortimer), with Mulligan providing vocals on some tracks. Basden composed over 20 songs for the movie, creating a musical history for the fictional folk duo. Trailer
Gondola
Georgia/Germany, 2024, 85 min, No Dialogue, Comedy/Romance
Directed by Veit Helmer
Rated PG
Set in the mountains of western Georgia, Gondola tells the story of two women finding love as they pass each other in their cable cars in the sky. Iva (Mathilde Irrmann) gets a job as a conductor mostly because she fits the uniform shoved at her by her boss. As she passes Nina (Nini Soselia), the conductor of the other cable car, they get to know each other through games and gifts. This relationship evolves without the spoken word. By stripping away the dialogue from the storytelling, the director, Veit Helmer, forces his characters to communicate their feelings in other ways. Film Critic, Wendy Ide, suggests that perhaps Helmer fell in love with the location first and the story may have simply been a means by which to share the setting with audiences. Whatever the intent, this charming, funny, and fanciful film is a cinematic experience like no other. Trailer
Sunday, February 15
Jour de fête
France, 1949, 86 min, Subtitled, Comedy
Directed by Jacques Tati
Special Introduction by Trond Trondsen
In his enchanting debut feature film, Jour de fête (known as The Big Day in the US), director and actor Jacques Tati stars as an inept and easily distracted postman who spends his days delivering the mail in a rural French village. When a carnival arrives in town, he watches a spoof film about the speed and efficiency of the US Postal Service. He becomes jealous and is inspired to become like the American mail carriers, even though he only has a bicycle. Shot largely in and around Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, where Tati lived during the Nazi occupation, many of the local inhabitants were included in the film as extras. Jour de fête is an incisive observation on post-war French society. Tati’s films often satirized the absurdities and paradoxes of modernization, technology, and consumer culture. He pointed out that adopting new technology did not always change life for the better. Trailer
Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man
Canada, 2025, 78 min, Documentary
Directed by Trevor Solway
Rated 14A (coarse language)
What does it mean to be a (Native) man? In Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man, filmmaker Sinakson Trevor Solway returns to his home nation of Siksika to reveal a portrait of Indigenous masculinity rarely seen on screen. Through deeply intimate conversations, Solway offers unfiltered glimpses into the daily lives of his fellow Blackfoot men. Fathers, sons, artists, athletes, DJs, each navigating what it means to be a man in a world that often misunderstands and stigmatizes who they are. Solway, who grew up feeling pressure to “cowboy up,” quietly dissects and prods at rigid ideals of manhood, calling on the bonds of kinship he’s nurtured over a lifetime. Set against the sweeping backdrop of the Prairies, Siksikakowan resonates as a luminous exploration of strength and vulnerability across generations of men and boys embracing the intricacies of self-discovery, identity and love. The film premiered at Hot Docs 2025 and won the Audience Choice Award at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. Trailer
DJ Ahmet
North Macedonia, 2025, 99 min, Subtitled, Drama
Directed by Georgi M. Unkovski
Rated PG
DJ Ahmet is a bittersweet story of a 15-year-old boy from a remote Yuruk village in North Macedonia. Ahmet’s father, in his grief over the loss of his wife, shows little compassion for his teenage son. Rather, he spends plenty of time and money taking Ahmet’s younger brother, Naim, to visit a dubious healer to cure his muteness. Ahmet finds refuge in electronic dance music while navigating his father’s expectations, a conservative community, and his first experience with love. Ahmet’s world is disrupted by the arrival of Aya, a TikTok minded, club-curious girl returning from Germany. Director Georgi Unkovski has been praised for his perceptive writing, which contrasts youth plugged into the modern world while dealing with the weight of tradition. DJ Ahmet premiered at the 2025 Sundance International Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award and the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. Trailer