Directed by Mary Stephen • Documentary • 2026 • 109 minutes
Spanning eight decades and four continents, filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen embarks on a personal investigation into her English surname. It is not intended to be a narcissistic exploration, but rather an effort to uncover the dissonances and contradictions in our heritage that, despite our all too human desire for harmony and continuity, are the fundamental elements that shape us.
Drawing from her father’s home movies and diaries, family photographs, fragments of oral history and official archives, Stephen constructs a layered polyphonic narrative where personal memory and collective history converge. How and why did Hilda Yik and Chan Tik Fong become Hilda and Henry Stephen? PALIMPSEST: THE STORY OF A NAME assembles a delicate, fragmented mosaic meditation on reinvention, the irresistible temptation to rewrite one's story, and on the universal human impulse to fictionalize the self.
Up Next in Canada
-
War for the Woods
Directed by Sean Stiller, Geoff Morrison • Documentary • 2023 • 44 minutes
Thirty years after historic logging protests on Vancouver Island, the battle to protect old growth forests is still raging. War for the Woods follows a new generation’s campaign against logging that once again has capture...
-
Who By Fire
Directed by Philippe Lesage • Drama • With Arieh Worthalter, Paul Ahmarani, Noah Parker, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré • 2024 • 155 minutes
A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted co...
-
Adonis
Directed by Jérémie Battaglia • Documentary • 2024 • 52 minutes
Though it was once limited to elite athletes, the use of anabolic steroids has reached endemic proportions among young male bodybuilding and strength training enthusiasts. Daring to tackle the taboos surrounding the concept of male ...
