paraDOXA, our experimental program highlighting films that push the boundaries of documentary form, returns for its second year. With a focus on community, each screening is followed by an in-depth discussion with the director—led by a local film collective or arts organization—offering audiences a deeper understanding into the creative and political dimensions of each respective work. This year’s selection interrogates the fissures between history and mythology, materiality and memory, exposing how power is inscribed into landscapes, and how communities navigate these contested spaces.
Bouchra
Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, Italy/Morocco/United States, 2025, 83 mins 
A queer Moroccan filmmaker in New York calls home to Casablanca, confronting the tensions her sexuality has stirred with her mother. Documentary, autofiction and 3D animation transform the mother and daughter into coyotes, while real conversations with family and friends reveal emotional truths and the thrill of love. The film moves between imagined encounters and phone calls, exploring intimacy, distance and family bonds. Wise, tender and inventive, Bouchra captures the quiet courage and awkward beauty of parent-child relationships.
Frío Metal
Salón de Belleza, México, 2025, 103 minutes
Belleza traces the fragmented lives of two Mexican brothers, Óscar and Mario, torn apart by disappearance and fading memory. Guided by a young woman’s hypnotic voice, the film drifts through rituals, games and mystical gestures, blurring documentary and the supernatural. From mines to volcanoes, bodies and landscapes merge into currents of intensity, offering tender and disorganized visions of youth, memory and the violence of a world that spares neither Earth nor its inhabitants.
The Latest News from 'Deseret'
Christopher Pavsek, Canada, 2025, 77 mins
A sequel to James Benning’s avant-garde 1995 film Deseret, Pavsek’s experimental film traces the history of Utah from 1992 to 2024, a period of sweeping political, social and ecological change. Composed of 50 stories drawn from The New York Times, each condensed to five to seven sentences, the film pairs every spoken sentence with a single image and soundscape. The result is at once a chronicle of contemporary Utah, a meditation on journalistic form and a reflection on avant-garde cinema.
Partition / تقسیم
Diana Allan, Canada/USA, 2025, 61 mins
A meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget, Partition fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded from Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, tracing lines of continuity left by seismic displacement. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have seldom been told, and ways of colonial seeing that seep into the precarious present; Partition uses dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to both examine and recover Palestinian presence.
Puntos de fuga (Vanishing Points)
Lina Rodriguez, Canada/Colombia, 2025, 72 mins
Spanning more than 70 years, two women recount their experiences growing up in Colombia and immigrating to Canada. Intersecting key moments in Colombian history, Vanishing Points is an essay film reflecting on the tension between “official” history and personal stories, all framed within the complexities of diasporic identity. Shot on Super 8mm, Hi8 and digital formats, the film composes a polyphonic tapestry of mirrors, labyrinths, dreams and nightmares, destabilizing linear notions of history and perspective.
Soul of the Foot
Mustafa Uzuner, Turkey/Canada, 2025, 66 mins
Opening on a solar eclipse—an echo of the crescent on Turkey’s flag—this essay film traces a country suspended between past and present. Structured as a reverse homecoming, Soul of the Foot moves from intimate home video fragments to charged public spaces, where election chants, street musicians and shifting nationalisms shape daily life. Archival images and chance encounters explore rural villages and urban streets, elders and youth, demolition sites and open skies. A long-stalled EU application lingers in the background, emblematic of promises deferred. Attentive to memory and erasure, Uzuner asks what independence feels like when a history “written with blood” continues to press against the present.
WINDWARD
Sharon Lockhart, USA/Canada, 2025, 70 mins
Filmed on Fogo Island off the northern coast of Newfoundland, WINDWARD continues Sharon Lockhart’s long-standing exploration of place and community. In extended static takes, the film observes the island’s youth amidst tall grasses, volcanic rocks and the restless Atlantic. Sea, sky and shifting weather shape a series of composed tableaux where landscape and figure enter into close dialogue. Inspired in part by the legacy of The Fogo Process, Lockhart spent three summers building relationships within the island’s communities. The result is a patient portrait of a place and the young people who inherit its histories, attuned to the rhythms of land, light and weather.
To Alexandra (致亞歷珊卓)
Yi Cui, Canada/USA/China, 2025, 72 mins
Two travelogues intertwine across a century.
During her travels in the Himalayas, Alexandra David-Néel’s letters home shape a restless intellectuality. Meandering between past and present, To Alexandra invites viewers to reflect on colonial histories, war and spiritual inquiry; a meditation rooted in everyday correspondence. Filmmaker Yi Cui’s decade-long collaboration with local Tibetan communities presents an elegy led by a central question: what happens when violence eclipses history, yet fails to erase memory?
Screening Times