Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute present a special screening of Kanaval on February 20 in recognition of Black History Month. Filmmaker Henri Pardo will join after the screening for a discussion and Q&A moderated by film critic and Woodsworth College alum Sarah-Tai Black (HBA ’15).
Winner of TIFF’s 2023 Amplify Voices Award, Kanaval tells the story of Rico, a young boy who was brutally torn, along with his mother, from their native Haiti and relocated to Quebec in 1975. To mend a fractured relationship with his mother, Rico must come to understand the strange customs of his new world with the help of an imaginary friend, Kana, who emerges from Haitian mythology.
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave
Register for this free screening below
Born in New Brunswick to Haitian parents, Henri Pardo is the writer and director of Kanaval. This film won the Air Canada Audience Award at the 2023 Cinémania Film Festival. Kanaval also won the 2023 Amplify Voices Award for best BIPOC Canadian Feature and an honorable mention for best Canadian film at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
Henri is co-producer, director, and co-writer of Afro-Canada, a documentary series on the history of Afro-Canadians, nominated for the 2023 Gémeaux.
In 2020 and 2021, he filmed the feature documentary Dear Jackie in partnership with Documentary Channel (CBC) and produced by CatBird Productions. The film is screened in 2021 and 2022 in theaters and festivals, and won the Magnus Isacsson Prize at the 2021 RIDM. The film has been broadcast on CBC/Gem since February 2023 and received three nominations at the 2023 Canadian Academy Awards.
In 2019, Henri produced and directed his first documentary series entitled Black Wealth Matters. He also directed the documentary Afro-Prospérité broadcasted on ICI Télé and Tou.tv, produced by Black Wealth Media, a production company he founded in 2016.
Henri is a graduate of the National Institute of Image and Sound (INIS) and is a founding member of Black on Black Films.
Sarah-Tai Black is a film programmer, arts curator, critic, and film/story consultant who was born and (mostly) raised in Treaty 13 Territory/Toronto. They are a non-binary femme of Afro-Brazilian, Chinese, and European settler ancestry whose creative efforts work to center embodied Black, queer, trans, and crip freedom practices with an emphasis on working relations that interrogate and dismantle white supremacy culture. They are interested in art and space-making that speaks back to conventional ways of seeing and being seen and experiments counter to presupposed boundaries of form and structure.
Sarah-Tai currently works as Manager, Programming at Regent Park Film Festival, programs the semi-monthly screening series Black Gold at Toronto’s Paradise theatre, and contributes film and arts criticism to The Globe and Mail, The Los Angeles Times, and CBC Arts. They are a regular contributor on CBC’s Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud where they speak on all things film, television, and pop culture; they are also a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and GALECA – the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics.
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