Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC)

Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) CFMDC is Canada's foremost non-commercial distributor of independent and artists' films.

CFMDC is Canada's foremost non-commercial distributor of independent and artists' films from both Canada and around the world.

06/23/2026

🎀 Available now on VUCAVU, “THE PLEASURE FILES: Q***r & Feminist Joy in the Canadian Video Archive”, curated by Axelle Demus

“THE PLEASURE FILES: Q***r & Feminist Joy in the Canadian Video Archive” brings together five works from the Canadian audiovisual archival record that revel in feminist joy, q***r irreverence, and unruly laughter.

Including Gabey and Mike: A Jewish Summer Camp Love Story by Alexis Mitchell and Stephanie Markowitz. Taking its name from a song by Mermaid Café - a folk band composed of Andi D., Joe A. Rider and Merrill Nisker (now known as ‘Peaches’) that gained popularity at Canadian Jewish summer camps in the early 90s. A q***r re-staging of the classic summer camp movie, the film juxtaposes the tropes of this genre alongside references from iconic q***r films.

The titles in this program are available to watch with an active VUCAVU.education institutional subscription or can be purchased for limited-time rental via the Private Page function. Learn more by emailing [email protected].

Clip: Trailer for Gabey and Mike: A Jewish Summer Camp Love Story (2016) by Alexis Mitchell and Stephanie Markowitz

06/09/2026

💧June 15 in Vancouver, BC: Notes in Origin: The Films of Ellie Epp presented by DIM Cinema and the Iris Film Collective

This retrospective features Epp’s four 16mm films (1975–1996) in new digital restorations, and five more recent digital video works never before shown in Vancouver.

“Epp’s meticulously minimalist films invite a lyrical looking and seeing, listening and hearing. Each work is an instrument of perceptual and philosophical inquiry, an encounter with fleeting and feeling moments.” - DIM Cinema

“Several filmmakers continue to explore space and landscape on film.... Ellie Epp’s ‘Trapline’ (1976) is the most cooly beautiful of all: filmed in the Silchester Road Public Baths, London, it sets a sequence of geometrically organized shots, outwardly but gently alive with light changes, ripples and reflections, within the continuous, distantly reverberant sound space of the entire building.” - Tony Reif, Self Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas

🗣️ Introduced by programmer Alex MacKenzie of Iris Film Collective.

🗓️ Monday, June 15, 7pm
📍 The Cinematheque, Vancouver BC
🔗 https://thecinematheque.ca/films/2026/ellie-epp

Clip: Trapline by Ellie Epp (1976)

05/27/2026

🎶 June 2nd in Toronto, ON: CFMDC co-presents What Will I Become? at CineCycle

In What Will I Become?, directors Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos explore the vulnerability of their transmasculine+ community. They delve into their own personal experiences, intertwining the stories of two young trans men who died by su***de.

Homecoming king Blake Brockington and soft-spoken Kyler Prescott were poets, musicians, and community advocates. The film traces their joys and challenges, their tragic deaths and resulting media attention, and the larger aftermath within their communities. The film also uplifts resources that affirm trans boys and the trans community as a whole to provide an understanding of su***de-prevention practices.

What Will I Become? asks why the transmasculine community is particularly vulnerable to living briefly and dying quietly.

🗣️ Post screening Q&A moderated by Lily Kazimiera.

🗓️ Tuesday June 2, 2026, Doors open at 6:30pm, screening at 7:00pm.
📍 CineCycle, 129 Spadina ave
🔗 https://arquives.ca/event/what-will-i-become/

Image: poster for ‘What Will I Become?’ Courtesy of the Arquives

05/12/2026

🌟 May 13-17 in Calgary, AB: Fairy Tales Q***r Art & Film Festival returns for its 28th year with films, performances, installations, DJs, drag, and nightlife.

Don’t Take My Joy Away by Omar Gabriel screens May 16th as part of Programmers Choice Shorts Package. Set in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, two friends revel in the small joys of life until violence suddenly disrupts their world. Forced to flee, they embark on a dangerous journey of survival, confronting fear, chaos, and the stark realities around them. Along the way, they must choose between remaining in the shadows or seeking the light.

💫 “Programmer’s Choice is a bold, unforgettable collection of films that rose to the top—where humour meets heartbreak, and intimacy collides with provocation. Spanning continents and experiences, these stories linger in the body and mind, inviting us into moments of risk, desire, and transformation that refuse to be forgotten.”

🗓️ May 13-17, 2026
📍Calgary, AB
🔗 https://q***rfilmfest.ca/ ***rartsyyc

Clip: Don’t Take My Joy Away (2024) by Omar Gabriel

05/06/2026

💫 May 7-10 in Halifax, NS: The 15th Annual Animation Festival of Halifax (AFX 15) includes workshops, panels, artist Q&As, film screenings, and special events.

Don’t miss:
🎨 Martha Griffith’s film Menders screens May 8 as part of Up Late. This short is follows a female art conservator restoring Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.”
🎞️ Richard Reeves Retrospective showcases a selection of films from Reeves’ impressive oeuvre of direct animation, spanning the early 90s to today. The screening will be preceded by the work made in his open studio and followed by a Q&A with the artist himself.

🗓️ May 7 - 10, 2026
📍Halifax, NS
🔗

Clip: TV (2018) by Richard Reeves

04/22/2026

🔢 ON NOW until April 30, online: Labocine’s April 2026 Edition mathēmatiká explores cinema through numbers, patterns, algorithms, and abstraction: films where geometry becomes choreography, probability becomes narrative, and equations dissolve into image and sound.

“Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her to hold close to her language, culture, and roots.” - Tara Hakim, Toronto Q***r Film Festival

The April issue of Labocine also includes CFMDC films: Lines Drawn by Chris Kennedy and Ville Marie by Alexandre Larose.

🗓️ April 1-30, 2026
🔗 Online labocine.com

Clip: Abgad Hawaz (2024) by Robin Riad

04/20/2026

📽️ April 30 to May 3 in Hawick, Scotland: Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival returns for its sixteenth year, presenting thoughtfully curated screenings and exhibitions of artists’ moving image works.

🔆 Don’t miss CFMDC films the following shorts programs:
1️⃣ Robin Riad’s short Abgad Hawaz screens in the program How Do we Communicate, How, which ponder the power and politics of language.
2️⃣ A Place That Can Never Be Reached ruminates on perception and interpretation through mapping and includes Morgan Sears-Williams’ short through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me.
3️⃣ Lilan Yang’s film Untitled Film Disinfection Project 1 screens in Your Body Has Never Been Your Own, a program that situates struggle and survival within the structures of the state apparatus. & Lilan Yang is present for the Q&A of this screening!

🗓️ April 30 - May 3, 2026
📍 Hawick, Scotland
🔗

Clip: Untitled Film Disinfection Project 1 (2025) by Lilan Yang .studio

04/14/2026

🌳ON NOW until April 30, online: Labocine’s April 2026 Edition mathēmatiká explores cinema through numbers, patterns, algorithms, and abstraction: films where geometry becomes choreography, probability becomes narrative, and equations dissolve into image and sound.

Chris Kennedy’s film Lines Drawn (2023), shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other?

➕ The April issue of Labocine also includes CFMDC films: Abgad Hawaz by Robin Riad and Ville Marie by Alexandre Larose

🗓️ April 1-30, 2026
🔗 Online labocine.com

Clip: Lines Drawn (2023) by Chris Kennedy

04/09/2026

🍃 April 1-30, online: Labocine’s April 2026 Edition mathēmatiká explores cinema through numbers, patterns, algorithms, and abstraction: films where geometry becomes choreography, probability becomes narrative, and equations dissolve into image and sound.

Including Ville Marie by Alexandre Larose, an optically printed dream of falling, both gorgeous and ominous. The body in mid-air. A canyon of high-rise buildings.

“The works of Alexandre Larose amount to a contemporary cinema of attractions. They are a continuous attempt at describing (and making palpable) the overlapping meshes of film, memory, and the way we experience dreams and space.” -Alejandro Bachmann, Austrian Film Museum

The April issue of Labocine also includes CFMDC films: Abgad Hawaz by Robin Riad and Lines Drawn by Chris Kennedy.

🗓️ April 1-30, 2026
🔗 Online labocine.com

Clip: Ville Marie (2009) by Alexandre Larose

03/31/2026

✨ New hi-resolution scans of Martha Davis’ short films Introducing Elwy (1979), Applying and Removing (1979) and A Ball in California (1980) are now available at CFMDC!

1️⃣ Introducing Elwy (1979) Elwy Yost as a purely physical presence as he talks to the camera, often in extreme close-up.

2️⃣ Applying and Removing (1979) Applying: a n**e woman is painted completely black. Removing: she washes herself off in the bathtub, and goes from black to grey to white

3️⃣ A Ball in California (1980) I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me.

Martha Davis has been making films and photographs for the past 40 years in Toronto, Canada. Self-taught, she has created two feature-length films, one of which has screened internationally (“PATH,” 1987), and 18 shorts, two of which were nominated for Genies and were screened at TIFF (“Elephant Dreams”, 1988 and “Reading between the Lines,” 1990).

🌟 Accessibility has become a key focus for collecting organizations of all kinds. Given CFMDC’s role as a distributor, the work of providing more open, widespread, and easier access to titles in our collection is a primary focus. To improve the accessibility of the films in our collection, we collaborate with the TMU film lab to digitize older works. These new hi-resolution scans mean that we now have a significantly higher quality digitization for circulation.

💌 For rental and sale inquiries, contact [email protected]

series focuses on different aspects of the CFMDC film collection that are held in our film vault.

Clip: Applying and Removing (1979) by Martha Davis

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Toronto, ON
M5V3A8

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Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm

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