Film Love is a Revolutionary Act
These selected works aim to allow young minds a moment to process how we channel love into our lives, personally, socially, politically, humanly and creatively.

Curated by Charles Officer

Charles Officer is the founder and creative director of Canesugar Filmworks. A former professional hockey player, he studied design at OCAD before attending the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York City. Officer wrote and directed Nurse.Fighter.Boy (Toronto International Film Festival, 2008; MoMA 2009), starring Clark Johnson (The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street), and garnered a record-breaking 10 Canadian Screen Award nominations in 2010. He followed with Mighty Jerome for the National Film Board of Canada and won a 2012 Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary. In 2017, he premiered Unarmed Verses, which won Best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs and the Vancouver International Film Festival, and the Audience Choice Award at TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten honours. Officer has directed multiple episodes of television including Private Eyes (Ion), 21 Thunder (Netflix), Ransom (CBS) and Coroner (CBC). 2020 marks the release of his crime-drama Akilla’s Escape starring acclaimed singer, songwriter and actor Saul Williams (Slam, Aujourd’hui). Additionally, he serves on the Board of Trustees at the AGO.

Working imaginatively with the famous line “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” we explore the global legacy of The Little Prince 75 years after its publication. The film introduces a modern day Little Prince – a seven-year-old blind Pakistani-Canadian boy who absorbs the book for the first time – while interweaving the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s extraordinary biography with fascinating discussions that grapple with the meanings of this transcendent story.

One Sunday a month, natural hair specialist Nancy Falaise closes the doors of her Montreal salon to lead a private workshop for young girls of colour struggling to love their natural hair. Step-by-step, she teaches them how to wash, detangle, style and care for their respective hair textures, while also creating a safe space for them to bond over their shared experiences and forge meaningful friendships.

Nancy’s Workshop is an intimate and immersive exploration of this journey. It offers a vivid, almost tactile experience of manipulating various curl patterns and textures through the use of extreme close-ups and macro cinematography.

Director Mina Shum makes her foray into feature documentary by reopening the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations – the infamous Sir George Williams Riot. Over four decades after a group of Caribbean students accused their professor of racism, triggering an explosive student uprising, Shum locates the protagonists and listens as they set the record straight, trying to make peace with the past.