Évènement à venir
- FOCUS-DOCU #2: The ethics of looking - November 6, 2025 - 6 pm - 9 pm
- Meet the Film Factory residents (2023-2024) - December 15, 2025 - 6 pm - 9 pm
6
Nov
FOCUS-DOCU #2: The ethics of looking
Meetup, Rencontre - Documentary Cinema - Fall 2025
Date / Heure
6 November 2025
6 pm - 9 pm
Lieu
Main Film Atelier
2025 Rue Parthenais #304-A, Montréal, Quebec, H2K 3T2
Guests | Khoa Lê (Ma Sài Gòn), Lamia Chraibi (Circo), and Léa Clermont-Dion (La peur au ventre)
More guests to be announced soon!
Free upon registration
As part of its documentary series, Main Film presents FOCUS-DOCU: a series of meetings taking place on the first Thursday of every month this fall! These panels will focus on the multiple potentials and challenges of documentary cinema today.
Looking is in itself a political act. This round table discussion will examine the ethical responsibility of documentary filmmakers: filming trauma, entering into intimate spaces, negotiating consent, etc. How can we avoid reifying or exoticizing the subjects we film? This conversation will bring together filmmakers and programmers to explore a more conscious approach to documentary filmmaking.
For more information, please send an email to: services@mainfilm.qc.ca
Khoa Lê is a filmmaker, director, video designer, and author of feature films, documentaries, essays, video installations, music videos, magazines, and commercials. Through his artistic creations, he seeks to blur the boundaries between the sacred, the mundane, the real, and the imaginary. His quest for artistic freedom and his desire to expose creative gestures drive him to transcend formal boundaries.
Ma Sài Gòn (2023): Ma Sài Gòn questions the place of documentary filmmaking in the private lives of marginalized communities, avoiding exoticization and adopting a respectful and participatory stance. It raises questions about the ethical representation of queer identity in a complex cultural context.
A #MainArtist of Main Film, Lamia Chraibi is a Franco-Moroccan filmmaker based in Montreal. She is particularly interested in themes of social justice, identity, family, and territory. She also explores topics related to body language and social art. Human beings are at the heart of her approach. Her studies in social sciences (Sorbonne, Paris) and documentary filmmaking (INIS, Montreal) have shaped her sensitive and committed view of the world. Her art is nourished by her questions about identity, her migratory journey, and her travels.
Lamia’s cinema is based on time and the trust she builds with her subjects. With a poetic approach, her camera gives a voice to forgotten people from diverse backgrounds.
Circo (2025): The film explores an ethical approach to viewing rooted in proximity and listening, without ever falling into miserabilism or appropriation. Through her immersive approach, the director questions how to film transition, trauma, and hope with sensitivity and respect for consent.
Léa Clermont-Dion is a filmmaker and postdoctoral research associate at Concordia University. She holds a PhD in political science from Laval University. Her research focuses on cyberviolence against women, women’s empowerment on social media, violence against women, and more. She received the Vanier Scholarship, one of the most prestigious doctoral scholarships in Canada. Léa has worked with the Conseil du statut de la femme, the Secrétariat à la condition féminine, and the Association Munyu des femmes de la Comoé, a partner of OXFAM in Burkina Faso. She has given over 200 presentations on women’s issues, including presentations to the Council of Europe. She has directed a dozen short films for Radio-Canada in Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Germany. She is the director of three documentaries: T’as juste à porter plainte (Noovo), Je vous salue salope : La misogynie au temps du numérique (La Ruelle Films), and Janette et filles (La Ruelle Films). She is also the author of three books: La revanche des moches (2014), Les Superbes (2016), and Crève avec moi (2019).
La peur au ventre (2025): By overturning Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a fifty-year leap backward by ensuring that abortion is no longer a protected right. This setback is symptomatic of a disturbing polarization. Disturbed by this historic situation, filmmaker and feminist Léa Clermont-Dion asks: what effect will this legal setback have here? The documentary La peur au ventre explores the rise of anti-abortion groups in Canada. The mobilization is taking place here and now, in Quebec. Throughout the narrative, the filmmaker also presents the feminist and pro-choice response that is organizing across the country. Léa Clermont-Dion once again offers a hard-hitting film that combines embodied analysis with her own critical perspective.
15
Dec
Meet the Film Factory residents (2023-2024)
Meetup, Rencontre - Documentary Cinema - Fall 2025
Date / Heure
15 December 2025
6 pm - 9 pm
Lieu
Main Film Atelier
2025 Rue Parthenais #304-A, Montréal, Quebec, H2K 3T2
Guests | Irina Tempea (Bica), Yen-Chao Lin (Invisible Landscape), and Chantal Partamian (Adumbration)
Free upon registration
Come and meet the three artists selected for the 2023-2024 Film Factory, supported by Main Film as part of a one-year residency dedicated to research or production in experimental cinema. From submitting their applications to screening their works at various festivals, through their phases of creative exploration, they will share the major milestones of their journey as well as the concrete benefits of this residency.
This is an excellent opportunity for those considering submitting a project to the 2025-2026 edition of the Manufacture de Films!
This exchange will provide a better understanding of how the program works, but also open up a space for dialogue around the projects in progress, the experiences, the challenges, the highlights, and the experimentation processes specific to each resident.
Deadline for the next application: January 20, 2025
For more information, please send an email to: services@mainfilm.qc.ca
Irina Tempea
Irina Tempea is a filmmaker and cultural worker of Romanian origin based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her artistic practice, which resembles a personal diary, revolves around the analog process she uses to reveal herself. In doing so, she questions the materiality of film while filming her daily life and loved ones. She has just completed her first short film, Dans ma tête, which deals with her multiple sclerosis. Irina holds a bachelor’s degree in film studies from the University of Montreal. She now wishes to open up a dialogue with other cinematographic devices in order to bring them together in a second work.
About Bica :
Bica is an experimental short film about my Romanian origins. In the research phase, my project focuses on exploring my Romanian identity as a second-generation immigrant, highlighting the links between the landscape, textures, colors, and memories associated with my grandmother. This approach aims to reveal the facets of my cultural heritage, while exploring how these visual and sensory elements have shaped my perception of the world. This exploration of identity will be done through my grandmother’s eyes and through the exploration of the texture and colors associated with the territory. Bica is actually the diminutive of bunica, which means grandmother in Romanian.
Yen-Chao Lin
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a multidisciplinary artist born in Taipei and based in Montreal. Having grown up in a multi-faith family, she is interested in religion, spirituality, divination arts, dowsing, occult sciences, alchemy, Feng Shui, oral tradition, and power—anything that can be perceived but not necessarily seen. Passionate about natural history and an avid collector, Yen-Chao gathers specimens of mineral, botanical, animal, and industrial origin, including objects that bear witness to the recent or distant past and have a story to tell. Through intuitive play, collaboration, salvaging, and collecting, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enameling, ceramics, textiles, and gilding, to create installations, sculptures, and experimental films.
About Invisible Landscape :
Invisible Landscape is the production of a short film about Taiwanese Taoist folk religion with a particular focus on Feng Shui, exploring the invisible ways in which popular beliefs shape collective culture and personal identity. It is an experimental landscape film that uses the organic texture of the cinematic form to support its complex, varied, and vibrant folkloric content, capturing the unique symbiotic relationship of Taoist folk beliefs in contemporary Taiwan.
Chantal Partamian
Chantal Partamian is an experimental filmmaker and archivist specializing in Super 8 mm film and archival footage. Her films, which have been recognized and awarded at numerous festivals, are distributed by Vidéographe, the Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. As an archivist, Chantal Partamian specializes in the conservation and restoration of film reels from the eastern Mediterranean as part of the Katsakh Mediterranean Archives project, while conducting research on archival practices in conflict zones. Her writings are mainly published in the journal Hors-Champ. Chantal Partamian’s work spans both the artistic and archival fields, merging experimental cinema and preservation efforts aimed at safeguarding the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean region.
About Adumbration :
In 1989, only an intercine moviola survived an explosion in my father’s film studios. In this Lovecraftian Beirut, the machine has been attempting to turn back time ever since, in an effort to shed light on the moment of the catastrophe and find a solution to the ultimate evil that looms over the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, a graveyard sea that holds deep within it the ultimate book, the Necronomicon, written by AlHazred, the mad scientist who disappeared in Damascus centuries ago.