Nadia Louis-Desmarchais

A filmmaker explores the intricate connections between race and identity at the core of her personal story.

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Currently, post pandemic, one in two young people show symptoms of anxiety and depression. The World Is Ours is a film that gives the opportunity to six Montreal teenage girls to leave their urban environment for the first time to take part in a nature canoe-camping expedition. By presenting their struggles and small victories, the film poetically and luminously embraces their vulnerability, emphasizing in broad strokes the power of female sisterhood and therapeutic intervention by nature. Using an intervention cinema approach and seeking to democratize access to the outdoors for marginalized communities, the production of the film took on the responsibility of defraying the costs of the expedition for these six young women.

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Aïcha, a 7-year-old black girl receives a drawing mocking her hair. With the help of her big sister, they will spend the evening trying to make her beautiful like her classmates. How far is she willing to go to be seen and accepted?

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Lila goes to her grandmother’s to spend the weekend. There, she meets her cousin Maxime with whom she has been very close since childhood. It’s during this weekend that an event will forever change the relationship between the two and tarnish Lila’s worldview.

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Short documentary on Naila Rabel and her relationship with her body as she grew up having to navigate the stigma that fat people experience in our society.

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Rated X, a short documentary about the adult industry, focuses on giving a voice to the porn actresses working within it. In a perspective of showing how these women empower themselves with their job, Rated X shows the porn industry like never before.

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Urban is a short documentary on the importance of dance in shaping the identity of five young adolescent girls. In the Susp3ctz dance crew, they learn the basics of hip hop, house, krump, in order to learn to freestyle and reveal their own identity.

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Nothing moves without our imagination.

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While this film directly addresses an experience common to all mixed-race women, it delves more deeply into that of director Nadia Louis-Desmarchais. Born to a Haitian mother and an Italian-Quebecois father, the young woman raised in a white adoptive family examines the internalized and normalized racism that surrounds her. Her reflections on identity issues gradually combine with others related to maternal abandonment. Drawing on archives, testimonials, and stories of Black people, the director confronts family taboos, awkwardness, separations, and missed opportunities. A moving, introspective quest in which Nadia Louis-Desmarchais tries to piece together the puzzle of her identity and family.

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A filmmaker explores the intricate connections between race and identity at the core of her personal story.

Open details →

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Short documentary on Naila Rabel and her relationship with her body as she grew up having to navigate the stigma that fat people experience in our society.

Open details →