JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY JULIETTE POITRAS

13mins l Screen-life Documentary | Ontario Premiere

Logline: When I was little, I had three sisters.

“Returning to FOFS this year, Juliette Poitras’ screen-life diarism is a meditative consultation with the past’s residual impressions, soft marks that have imprinted themselves onto memory and that spring forth in a deluge of sentimentality. Though a reflexive distancing within her iteration of this very contemporary cinematic genre, Poitras intelligently manages the ephemera of passion and grief that oscillate across this excavation of archive and separation.”

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY LAURENCE OLIVIER

15mins l Documentary, Experimental | Ontario Premiere

Tattooed hands gently glide over a rock face, probing it with the tips of the fingers. Three women, arms raised to a high boulder, appear to be in prayer. Hidden in a cave, two others stare at their bloody palms. Touching Rocks depicts bouldering as a pagan ritual.  

“After beguiling FOFS audiences with Avance Masque at last year’s festival, Laurence Olivier returns with an equally elliptical and fragmented portrait of process and cumulative montage. In its steady unfurling of concept and representation, Touching Rocks evokes the excitement and intimacy of collective play, practiced struggle, and communal rootedness.”

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY ZOE ZHOU

11mins l Dark Comedy, Drama | Toronto Premiere

A nihilistic girl and a robot boy escape from their family to revive a dead fish.

“Zoe Zhou’s exceptional student project is a capricious experiment in short-form narrativity, imagining the initial glimmers of self-actualization through genre trappings that are persistently blown wide open. We Are Happy Fish is the culmination of an aesthetic inquiry thats uncanny mission to extract pathos from the hyperactive, engenders the oh-so-fun, yet oh-so-solemn tale of finding camaraderie under the anguish of parental abuse.”

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming"

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY SOPHIA SMITH

13mins l Drama, Dark Comedy | World Premiere

A couple, over the hump of the honeymoon period, moves into a more serious state of communication in their sexual relationship.

“Anchored by a charismatic and grounded performance from Mick Robertson, Sophia Smith’s hilarious Compliment Sandwich follows a young woman forced to reckon with her partner, and whether or not he still serves what she desires. The production design is hyper specific, painting a precise portrait of a man whose insecurities, both in his relationship and the broader context of his living situation, rebound into circuitous logic.” 

– Eric Bizzarri, CEO and Co-Founder

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY ELI JEAN TAHCHI

12mins l Documentary

 To support his mother in Mexico, Angel, a nude dancer, turns the web into his new stage.

“Staccato strings, gyrating hips, and too little tips highlight Eli Jean Tachi’s austere transactional documentary about a nude dancer who, in an effort to supplement his income and support his mother back home in Mexico, must invite anonymous, leering eyes back to his bedroom via webcam. Vulnerable and authentic, this portrait of the immigrant experience and modern sex work on a hybrid platform reflects an eerie similarity to nearly any trade. 0004NGEL shows that the basis of our economy is a need to be functional at any given time, even if it means forcing a smile while you’re falling asleep.”

– Andres Herrera, Associate Programmer

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY SARA WYLIE

5mins | Experimental Essay | Toronto Premiere

A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand. The short film addresses conventional narratives around the nature of illness and instead posits disability and crip time as natural sites of resistance against capitalism.

“Sara Wylie’s thumb on the juncture between disability and capitalism is a profoundly educational meditation, theorizing crip-time as an industrial alternative to the ableist conceptions of expected work/life balance ethics. Indeed, Resistance Meditation is a considered thesis, its title organizing a dialectic through which audiences may engage: what does resistance look like beyond its vernacular of bodily exertion and how does the ‘meditative’ act as an interlocutor, between our perceptions of a broken world and our ruminations on, in so many different forms, our broken down bodies?”

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY OLIVIA NORQUAY

5mins l Horror, Romance

A skin flick.

“Olivia Norquay's softer, softest could be described, at its most superficial, as nothing more than a man shaving his head in front of a camera. But Norquay takes this simple image to extremes that turn her film into a surprisingly transgressive and confrontational experience, one that forces viewers to contend with, and acclimatize to, their own reactions. “

– C.J. Prince, Associate Programmer

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY SALAR PASHTOONYAR

13mins l Drama, Biography

Amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a desperate civilian seeks a Taliban permit for his American employer, hoping it will secure his family’s evacuation.

“Inspired by real events, Salar Pashtoonyar's harrowing I Fear Blue Skies… follows an aid worker who must navigate the chaos of the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan, trying to find a way out of the country for him and his family. With skillful direction that ratchets up the tension until a gut punch finale, Pashtoonyar's film is a devastating glimpse at people whose lives are at the mercy of greater powers, caught in the tangle of Imperialism, a perspective where the tenuous position of the individual becomes most lucid.”

– C.J. Prince, Associate Programmer

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY WILL NIAVA

16mins l Drama

Koffi, a young Ivorian trumpeter, arrives in Montreal with nothing but the legacy of his father to guide him. Lost between the city's noise and the silence of his past, he must confront his roots to finally find his own voice.

“Will Niava returns to the festival with an energetic, vivaciously entertaining portrait of a young jazz musician forced to confront his past. From its first moments, Niava brings viewers into a world that swaps dialogue for melodies, coupled with cinematography that emphasizes urgency and yet ushers the story at a balanced pace. Niava allows the visuals to do the heavy lifting here, and it’s all the more engaging thanks to a fully realized, and striking performance from lead performer Ange Eric N'Guessan.”

– Eric Bizzarri, CEO and Co-Founder

JULY 23, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY NORA BURLET DHAINAUT

14mins l Drama

Lisa confronts Dan, her ex-partner, about what really happened between them.

“The sensitivity and curiosity that grounds Nora Burlet Dhainaut’s As Long As We Are Immortals confronts the viewer with a necessary troubling of sexual trauma’s effect on the victim, characterizing a dialectic of emotional turmoil that ensures the agency of our protagonist is never under question, and that the typified methods of understanding victimization are always scrutinized across the complex of an incommensurable violation of the self. Dhainaut situates the individual as a node in the social network that both facilitates and combats the capacity for sexual violence, rendering a deeply felt and intelligent portrait of the invisible ripples that tether us to one another.“

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

Shifting gears this year, we transition our Student Shorts programme from a pure showcase into a screening + educational panel, where candid discussion on, and a transparent look into, the machinations of festival curation will help to provide students and emerging artists with insight into the festival circuitry they enter into. Join us for a conversation about how a programmer’s subjective aesthetic sensibilities influence decision making, the larger curatorial discourse of meeting rooms, and how student filmmakers are preparing themselves for an environment where the percentile of success ranges between 2 and 13 percent. 

We have partnered with George Brown College to platform this educational programme, where we’ll be presenting 4 short films: two from our submissions pool and two from the capstone projects of George Brown’s graduating class. We’ll view and discuss the projects live with the filmmakers and audiences, discerning why these projects are chosen, how criticism works as a function of curation, and what the student filmmakers are able to discern through their interactions with festival institutions.

Featured in this year’s programme are Luke Donovan’s Come Out Lazarus and Lucia Fella Pellegrino’s I’ll Try to Explain it, both titles accepted from our open submissions call. Additionally, from George Brown’s graduating class, we screen Abby Boyd’s Hold Still and Willem Duff’s Crying Over Dead Cats. These four filmmakers will join FOFS’ CEO & Co-Founder, Eric Bizzarri, and Director of Programming, Zachary Goldkind, for an extended conversation with the audience to talk frankly about what this sphere of professionalization is all about and how schools are preparing students for a sector struck by economic woes.

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 26, 2026 l 10AM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY LUKE DONOVAN

13mins l Drama, Coming-of-Age | World Premiere

In the depths of winter, the youngest boy of a rural Ontario family initiates himself into hunting season with his father.

JULY 26, 2026 l 10AM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY WILLEM DUFF

16mins l Drama, Experimental | World Premiere

A year after their friendship ended, Levi returns home for spring break and reconnects with Alex—but as they spend time together, Alex’s world begins to unravel.

JULY 26, 2026 l 10AM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY ABBY BOYD

11mins l Drama | World Premiere

With everything to prove, a determined young painter competes in a twelve-hour art competition. But when her model becomes mysteriously frozen in time, she is forced to confront the truth that real creativity needs movement, vulnerability, and connection.

JULY 26, 2026 l 10AM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY LUCIA FELLA PELLEGRINO

15mins l Mockumentary, Hybrid Fiction

When a lesbian filmmaker is haunted by a recurring dream of her high school ex-boyfriend, she embarks on a documentary to reenact the dreams, awakening uncomfortable truths about her complicated relationship with men.  

With a collection of films boasting exciting and oblique psychoanalytical inquiry, we introduce FOFS’ first iteration of our National Spotlight Feature Programme, a cross-country celebration of cinematic perspective that invites films and/or filmmakers not based in Toronto to the city’s screens. As we continue to expand our programming, we are animated by the opportunity to bring more idiosyncratic work to our audiences, which this year’s National Spotlight most assuredly provides.

Opening the programme are two very distinct shorts regarding the dimensions of social alienation, the manufacturing of a gaze that instills with it a condition of judgement or prescription. Beginning the night is Luvleen Hunjan’s The Trial, a tense provocation towards questions of complacency and complicity. The friction that rises from this confrontation with silence transitions us into Jesse Padveen’s absurd highwire act that is The Sphinx. Padveen’s flavor of spectacle is self-effacing, both in rhetorical and literal terms, configuring a character profile thats loss and listlessness interlace to render a spectrum of sophistical behavioral code-switching.

The programme’s feature brings the Toronto premiere of local Bryce Hodgson’s Vancouver set and shot debut, Thanks to the Hard Work of the Elephants. Hodgson’s directorial debut is a formally playful and narratively candid portrayal of the fragmenting discord that institutional trauma inscribes onto its victims, however the film refuses to make spectacles of our protagonists’ suffering, instead deploying their desperation as a forked articulation of yearning desire and deep unrest. This dialectic inflects the central dynamic with a necessarily destabilizing force that resolutely positions us alongside the discovery and implications of this newfound, yet persistently scrutinized freedom that these characters have etched out for themselves.

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 24, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY LUVLEEN HUNJAN

13mins l Drama l Ontario Premiere

As her wedding approaches, a young woman's relationship with her fiancé is tested by a disturbing encounter with a stranger.

JULY 24, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY JESSE PAVDEEN

16mins l Nightmare Comedy | Ontario Premiere

A locksmith's date night becomes a waking, liminal nightmare. 

JULY 24, 2026 l 7:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY BRYCE HODGSON

93mins l Drama, Fantasy l Toronto Premiere

Based on a true story… Elephants is a queer love fantasy that follows two teenage boys who escape an abusive youth lockdown detention center while high on LSD. They steal the center’s van and drive 400 km’s to a big-box store parking lot, determined to start an alternative youth commune in a nearby suburban forest.

Content Warnings: Depictions of child abuse, Depictions of sexual abuse, Flashing Images, Depictions of suicide

A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow after the screening.

Organized around experimental expressions of cinematic inquiry, our Centrepiece Feature Programme presents a robust and confrontational set of visions, which together facilitate divergent yet corroborating elliptical conceptions of witnessing. For these works, our future is bound up in the details that become obfuscated by the acceleration of our contemporary. Opening the programme is Charlie Marois’ Cimes, a stroboscopic, single-frame animation where the canopy of a tree is unfurled as a timeline of comprehensive change. Marois’ film repositions our gaze against nature into one that bares the markings of an elapsed time marginalized to the ephemera of our quotidian calendars.   

In Charlotte Zhang’s feature debut, Tycoon, the calendar becomes a predestination, her fiction set against the near-future runup of 2028’s Summer Olympics, observing two young men swept up in the tide of a closeted socioeconomic collapse, amongst livestock pandemics and city-wide cockroach infestations. For Zhang, Los Angeles is a liminal zone of centrifugal disenfranchisement. Her MiniDV tape captures the intimacy of our focal friend/partnership, but also the bustle and mass of movement of an underground. While reflexively understood as documentary footage, these scenes are shrewdly recontextualized as a body interplaying with the fictive, pronouncing in play a resistance against the violences of an extractivism defined by the spectacle of world-spanning institutionalization. Zhang instrumentalizes these ulterior spectacles of recreation as a rebuke to the estrangement her protagonists weave their way through, treading hard to keep their heads above polluted water by any means necessary, beset by a matrix of financialized abstraction.

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 25, 2026 l 6:00 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY CHARLIE MAROIS

12mins l Experimental l Canadian Premiere

An impressionistic exploration of the canopy, captured frame by frame.

Content Warning: Strobe Effect for Photosensitive Viewers

JULY 25, 2026 l 6:00 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY CHARLOTTE ZHANG

88mins l Experimental, Crime, Coming-Of-Age |
Eastern-Canadian Premiere

Los Angeles on the cusp of the 2028 Summer Olympics: a series of devastating livestock viruses have wiped out meat and poultry production across the nation, leaving genetically-modified cockroaches the most viable alternative. Meanwhile, a cockroach infestation of biblical proportions overwhelms the city, triggering a rash of eminent domain abuses. Two young grifters dream up their next big score in a paranoid landscape perpetually reshaped by the collapse between legitimized and illegitimate forms of celebration and theft.  

Content Warning: Strobe Effect for Photosensitive Viewers

A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow after the screening.

After a world premiere at Sundance in 2025, and an accomplished festival run around the world, Never Get Busted! celebrates its Toronto premiere at the 2026 Future of Film Showcase. The film follows the frankly insane story of a former cop that, in quite the roundabout fashion, takes the law into his own hands, deciding he’s no longer content to be a part of a system that so transparently abuses drug arrests. In these efforts he figures, ‘why not use the knowledge I’ve gathered over the years, and, well…help the very people I busted?’ The story unfolds rapidly, and at a pace impossible to divert your attention away. This film does not separate antagonists, and protagonists, but rather provides commentary on how these institutions of power handle drug users, inquiring into the cost of this harm, and asking bluntly when is it necessary to help?

Preceding the feature, is a short film with a protagonist just as ambitious: Wolf Ruck, Mississauga resident, and someone who disagrees with the way in which his city polices the maintenance of one’s front yard. Wolf sees this space as a forest he wants to see flourish around his home, cultivating an ecology that supports itself, that doesn’t abide by the stifling of nature to appease the aesthetic sensibilities of neighbours. Stunning cinematography, and a subject that will make you laugh just as much as he’ll make you feel empowered, A Wolf in the Suburbs is a film that may just teach you not to settle.

– Eric Bizzarri, CEO & Co-Founder

JULY 25, 2026 l 9:00 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY AMÉLIE HARDY

18mins l Documentary

Welcome to Mississauga where lawns are clipped, neighbors are watchful and no blade of grass dares misbehave. Except at Wolf Ruck’s place. His lawn grows wild, and so does the trouble.

JULY 25, 2026 l 9:00 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

CREATED BY DAVID ANTHONY NGO AND ERIN WILLIAMS-WEIR

DIRECTED BY STEPHEN MCCALLUM
WRITER AND DIRECTOR DAVID ANTHONY NGO

109mins l Documentary, Comedy, True Crime l Eastern Canada Premiere

Barry Cooper was a highly decorated Texas narcotics officer - until he turned on the police force, busting crooked cops and teaching drug users how to hide their stash.

A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow after the screening.

Our Closing Night Gala Programme presents two films of wayward creative momentum: the stifled, often abstract (or abstracting) nature of our environments as both corroborator and channeler of the affects that dictate psychosocial mobility. These are films that centre the artist as a node through which their known worlds become refracted and reformed, perceived and reproduced in both known and unknown methodologies. Initiating the festival’s final program is director Jeremy Comte’s Brute, a petrified portrait of creative blockage, the mind of a struggling artist realizing its oppressive self-critiques as a hostile work studio. This destabilizing consideration of artistic pressures sets the stage, then, for the Toronto premiere and homecoming of Christopher Beaulieu’s debut feature Otium. 

Otium decidedly observes the steady social breakdown of Eliza Martin’s Hanna, a Mississauga based photographer caught in between the demands of her casual, gig-based occupation as a real estate photographer for Toronto rental units and her solo exhibition work, which she conceptually struggles against as personal economic pressures mount. This patient and formally sly character piece incisively understands the manners through which the self dissipates into tired rebellion, labouring against a transparent malevolence that courses through the systemic organizations of the world one seeks comfort and place in. Beaulieu’s image of Toronto is a pristine shell of absentee landlords, the sun’s shimmer off of condominiums’ window panes a blinding shrapnel of socioeconomic tensions that confound and unsettle the metropolitan vista as a cultural hub. Afterall, can an artist stand against the billowing efforts of financialization, its ruse of capital gain, its mission of dehumanizing the populace? Otium reckons this dynamic: is it Hanna or her specter that we watch evolve across the runtime?

– Zachary Goldkind, Director of Programming

JULY 26, 2026 l 8:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY JÉRÉMY COMTE

16mins | Drama, Horror, Experimental l Ontario Premiere

Overwhelmed by crippling anxiety, a young sculptor finds himself trapped in his studio.

JULY 26, 2026 l 8:30 PM ET
PARADISE THEATRE TORONTO

DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER BEAULIEU

79mins l Drama | Toronto Premiere

A young photographer living with her parents drifts between precarious jobs and an unfinished art project as she struggles to find a place of her own in an increasingly unaffordable Toronto.

A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow after the screening.