16 Apr The 2026 Film Factory Residency Recipients!
Main Film would like to congratulate the three recipients of The Film Factory: Mireille Tawfik, Sarah Foulkes et Emma Roufs !
This program offers artists the opportunity to take artistic risks as they develop, explore, and experiment with their artistic practices. As part of this initiative, they are provided with a supportive environment, equipment, and training at no cost, all designed to open up new creative possibilities for them.
Mireille Selwanes Tawfik is a multidisciplinary artist. With a background in theater, she is a writer, actress, cultural mediator, and director. In 2025, she created *How to Save a Dear Friend: Formulas for Coming Out into the Light*, a performance for two performers exploring the complexities of self-directed violence, which played to a sold-out audience at the Espace GO theater. Her first experimental short documentary, Marquer les fins (2024), produced with the support of Charles-André Coderre as director of photography and 16mm film technician, was screened at a dozen festivals in Montreal, Marseille, Beirut, Granada, Istanbul, Riga, Bolzano, Harrisburg, and Albuquerque.
Residency project – Reconnaissance territoriale
Through rephotography and the experimental transformation of archival images, this short documentary draws parallels between the reality of unceded territories in Quebec and that of Indigenous communities in Palestine and Lebanon. It questions the significance of declarations of territorial recognition when they fail to yield concrete results.
I am a Canadian-British filmmaker and cultural worker living in Montréal, Québec. I have a Bachelor’s in Cultural Studies from McGill University and a Master’s in Film Studies from Concordia University. Unbounded by genre or medium, I see every new project as an opportunity to expand the framework of my thinking and image-making. Through an exploration of feminism(s), labour and archives, my work is fed by a desire to experiment with the confines of narrative and to create an intimacy rooted in the observation of gestures and language.
Residency project – Reading Smoke
“Reading Smoke” is a cross-disciplinary experimental documentary short film, which uses Sheila Nadimi’s large-scale graphite drawings as offerings to be interpreted by a father and son, two researchers and practitioners in disciplines outside of the visual arts, and by myself, a filmmaker. The drawings present a pathway for new creation and an opportunity for cross-disciplinary communication.
password: r3ading_sm0k3
Emma Roufs is an experimental filmmaker who explores themes related to memory and wonder through the practices of found footage and the film essay, with a focus on analog Super 8 and 16 mm formats. Her films have been screened at various venues and festivals around the world. Emma is an independent curator as well as co-founder and co-director of la lumière collective, a curatorial collective, artist studio, and micro-cinema in Montreal dedicated to the dissemination and promotion of exploratory film practices.
Residency project – One petal at a time, to infinity
“One petal at a time, to infinity” is an exploratory project centered on the creation of images that will form the basis of a 16mm experimental short film, made by hand using an optical printer. The project seeks to examine the mechanisms of anxiety while delving deeper into themes of self-transformation and reconstruction.