Future in Focus: Art as a Driver for Change

“This film was a great collaborative effort to showcase all the innovative programs that exist in the Bow Valley in order for people and wildlife to coexist. I’m super excited to share it with our community before we take the film to a wider audience.” - Living with Wildlife’s Leanne Allison

The film illustrates how Bow Valley communities have adapted to living with wildlife — a spot described as the busiest place in the world where people and grizzly bears continue to coexist. The film also takes a realistic look at the challenges and the constant pressures wildlife face.

Housing prices are skyrocketing in cities around the world. Incomes are not. PUSH sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unliveable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. This is not gentrification, it’s a different kind of monster. The film follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, as she’s travelling the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why.

“I believe there’s a huge difference between housing as a commodity and gold as a commodity. Gold is not a human right, housing is,” says Leilani.

An unusually bitter Arctic blast has made its way to downtown Cincinnati and the front doors of the public library are where the action of the film takes place. The story revolves around the library patrons, many of whom are homeless, mentally ill and marginalized, as well as an exhausted and overwhelmed staff of librarians who often build emotional connections and a sense of obligation to care for them. At odds with library officials over how to handle the extreme weather event, the patrons turn the building into a homeless shelter for the night by staging an "occupy" sit in. What begins as an act of civil disobedience becomes a stand off with police and a rush-to-judgment media constantly speculating about what's really happening. This David versus Goliath story tackles some of our nation's most challenging issues, homelessness and mental illness and sets the drama inside one of the last bastions of democracy-in-action: your public library.

Starring Alec Baldwin, Taylor Schilling, Emilio Estevez, Jena Malone, Christian Slater, Gabrielle Union

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a glamping site near Takumi’s house; offering city residents a comfortable ‘escape’ to nature. When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, causing unrest. The agency’s mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the nature plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi’s life deeply.

"An instant masterpiece worthy of intense debate" - Barry Hertz, The Globe And Mail