TRUE NORTH

Michele Stephenson |
Canada, USA |
2025 |
96Min |
English, French
Set against the backdrop of 1960s Montreal, TRUE NORTH unearths two pivotal but underrecognized events, the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams Affair, positioning the city as a powerful nexus in the global Black liberation movement. Through never-before-seen archival footage and intimate first-person testimonies, the film revisits a charged era of resistance where Black students and activists challenged institutional racism that sparked reverberations across the globe. Taking a hemispheric view, TRUE NORTH connects threads from the Caribbean, Canada, and the US, tracing shared legacies of colonialism and state oppression. At the heart of the film are the elders whose contributions have largely gone unrecognized – their stories both an act of remembrance and a call to action for new generations.
Michele Stephenson
Leslie Norville
Stephen Chung

Screenings

28 Jul 19:30 Suncoast 8
2 Aug 14:00 Suncoast 6

Michele Stephenson

Emmy Award winning filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, draws from her Haitian and Panamanian heritage to transform non-fiction storytelling. Through a Black Atlantic lens, she reimagines narratives of resistance and healing, weaving fiction, immersive, experimental, and hybrid forms that center a Black Radical tradition and the lived experiences of the Black diaspora. Her non-fiction films Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games were both Oscar-shortlisted, with Going To Mars winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the prestigious Emmy Award for Outstanding Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking and Black Girls Play winning the Edward R. Murrow for Excellence in Video. Her other body of work includes The Changing Same, a magical realist VR installation that premiered at Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Showcase and won Tribeca’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative, along with several other projects recognized with Emmy nominations and a Canadian Screen Award nomination. Her newest work, True North: A Movement in Five Parts, is a creative non-fiction feature that explores the history of the Black liberation movement in Canada. She is a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, Creative Capital Artist, and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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