Michael Jones

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.

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Mike Jones and his siblings Andy and Cathy travel by helicopter from rural Newfoundland to a gala to make speeches congratulating TIFF on its anniversary.

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A graduate history student returns to her native Newfoundland, searching for proof of a conspiracy surrounding the referendum that saw Newfoundland join Canada.

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Faustus is a clerk in St. John's at the Newfoundland Department of Education. He dreams of becoming ruler of Newfoundland and seceding from Canada. In the real world, Faustus' boss Eddie Peddle plans to indoctrinate the citizenry of Newfoundland with a cult-like geometric theory known as Total Education, but Peddle may be foiled by the revelation of a secret from his past career.

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A nature documentary about the wild Nuns of Newfoundland-- Originated as a "filmeo" to be performed live by Codco, but eventually overdubbed with audio and released as a short film.

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A Codco documentary turned improvised drama about a woman named Dolly who, fed up with taking care of a group of ungrateful layabouts, runs away. The story is intercut with footage from another Codco project called "Borkin the Spineless Servant."

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This is the story of The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, a surreal comedy about a lowly bureaucrat and his fantasies of becoming president of an independent Newfoundland, that was released in 1986. A cult classic in Canadian cinema, the film is well known for the marathon it took to even get made. Principal photography on the film began eight years earlier, in 1978. Written and directed by comedy legend Andy Jones and his brother, Mike Jones, the movie was made on a shoestring budget, is packed with familiar faces and helped pave the way for Newfoundland and Labrador's vibrant film industry. And it was the first film ever both filmed and produced, from start to finish, in Newfoundland.

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After 30 years of salt beef and baloney, the instinctively vegan Isabel hops a bay bus to the city supermarket. But a nosy stock boy, a cashier with his laminated flip book of produce codes could wreak havoc with her newfound confidence.

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This documentary chronicles ocean disposal of surplus World War II chemical weapons by Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Through a well edited combination of interview footage and still photographs this film outlines the serious problem that awaits us now that hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons have been disposed of off our coastlines. The exact location of dumps was not always recorded on navigation charts. Sixty years later, containers that were designed to last for fifty years have started to disintegrate, posing substantial danger to both marine life and coastal communities.

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Something Dancing About Her is an affectionate portrait of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, a charismatic yet relatively unknown painter. Shedding fresh light on her place in Canadian art history, director Michael Ostroff chronicles the life of this remarkable creative spirit who threw herself into painting, left-wing politics and love affairs with equal enthusiasm.

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Mike Jones and his siblings Andy and Cathy travel by helicopter from rural Newfoundland to a gala to make speeches congratulating TIFF on its anniversary.

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Mary recounts to her daughter Eva the childhood story of when Mary and her father fell through the ice on a frozen pond.

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In this Christmas drama, a boy and his family discover he is an elf.

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A young girl in central Newfoundland becomes convinced she is connected to one of the last Beothuk people. As she and her father search for her mother’s grave near Red Indian Lake, an accompanying archaeologist with similar beliefs joins them, and their journey explores questions of heritage, memory, and identity.

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A group of elite soldiers, including one woman, sign up for the ultimate training mission. The group parachutes onto a remote island, where their objective is to reach the safety zone before the "opposing force" captures them. Everything does not go as expected, and the training mission turns into the real thing.

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