Sandheep Paravalappil is an Indian filmmaker based in Canada, currently working as

a director, video editor and freelance Journalist. He has served as an assistant

director on three Indian feature films, and his works as a director and scriptwriter

have been selected in international film festivals across the globe, including WHO

Health for All 2024 and the International Festival of Red Cross and Health

Films 2025. Passionate about visual storytelling that explores human struggles,

Dir. Statement:

With Get Connected, I wanted to create a cinematic experience that speaks a

universal language—one that transcends words. Mental health is often silenced,

hidden behind everyday routines, and I felt the most honest way to portray that

silence was through images and music rather than dialogue. The film follows three

individuals from different walks of life, all bound by an invisible thread of loneliness

and struggle.

By stripping away spoken words, I invite the audience to connect emotionally, to feel

rather than to be told. The visual and musical journey reflects how isolation can

weigh on the soul, yet also how even the smallest act of connection can spark hope.

Get Connected is not just a film about despair—it is a reminder that reaching out,

even in silence, can be an act of healing.

Philip Szporer is a filmmaker, writer, and lecturer whose lens explore the poetry

of motion and the pulse of human expression. Co-director of Mouvement Perpétuel and

dance+words, his work attempts to bridge disciplines and invites reflection. Honoured

with the Pew Dance/Media Fellowship and the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize, Philip teaches

at Concordia University, where he works to nurture a new generation of storytellers. His

films speak in rhythm and gesture—illuminating the spaces where art and life converge.

Dir. Statement: "I was drawn to the work of Cornelius Eady, an artist who has never

shied from matters of social justice and equity in his body of work. Eady continues to

shape the landscape of American literature. We've also been friends for four decades. It

was an honour to be given this opportunity to combine his poetry and movement in a

film. As a team we dove, through Cornelius' guidance, into the double-voiced discourses

of a particular Black literary tradition implicit in his poetry cycle which explores that

period of time between the loss of Philiis Wheatley's native West African tongue and its

replacement with English. By consequence, we were investigating the issues and

complications of race, place, and identity." 

lindsey addawoo is an award-winning writer/director from Toronto.

Her work is largely in the realm of drama and genre and has screened at film

festivals such as American Black Film Festival, Montreal Black Film Festival, and

Reelworld Film Festival. Her first short film, Queen of Hearts (2018), won the 2017

Inside Out Film Festival BravoFACT pitch award. She co-wrote Promise Me (2020), a

short film that won the Standout Short Film Writer Award at Reelworld Film Festival

where she was also a Reelworld E20 participant. Her credits include: Street Legal

(CBC), Coroner (The CW/Netflix/CBC), Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum

(PBS/TVO) and Director X’s Robyn Hood (Boat Rocker/Corus).

She is an alumna of BIPOC TV & Film’s inaugural Episodic Drama Writers’ Lab and

Showrunner Bootcamp led by showrunner Anthony Q. Farrell (The Office). lindsey

was later inducted into the 2022 Warner Bros. Discovery Access x Canadian

Academy Writers Program and was a recipient of the Rogers-Black Screen Office

(BSO) Script Development Fund in 2023.

Recently, she served as the associate story producer for The Legacy Awards, a live

special award show that features performances, awards and tributes honouring

both established and emerging Black Canadian talent.

Alexis L Wood is a British documentary filmmaker and has made documentaries for

the BBC, VICE, CBC and BRAVO on social issues and current affairs. She’s

particularly interested in the topics that we don't tend to discuss and with

communities that are underrepresented in the mainstream media.

Her first documentary How Long is Indefinite? was the first to expose the practice of

detention without time limit in the UK through the stories of three migrants trapped

in its immigration system. It has screened across the world and is currently being

distributed in the U.S. Since then, Alexis has worked on several one-off

documentaries for the BBC such as Autism: Challenging Behaviour, which was

shortlisted for a Grierson Documentary Award and Guilty by Association that

received viewing figures of 1.9 million.

Before making documentaries, Alexis spent five years working with refugees,

asylum seekers and migrant communities in the UK, Egypt and Palestine. Shecontinues this passion for communities that are often misrepresented by making

thought-provoking films that encourage us to question the status quo.

Dir. Statement:

This documentary is both political and personal, exploring how one group of

dancers plan to challenge long-held stereotypes by using performance to reflect the

colourism in Black communities back to the audience.

We want to spark meaningful dialogue about this topic. We want to provoke

racialized communities to help change this intra-community issue on both a socio-

political and intrapersonal level. Historically, darker skin tones haven’t been

positively represented on camera. We’re currently experiencing a shift in media

representation as more Black bodies enter the arts world. It’s becoming

increasingly difficult to ignore the need for a wide spectrum of skin tones. This piece

explores the dismantling of inherent, subconscious bias around colourism while

demystifying problematic and prejudiced notions of race and skin tone ingrained in

our society.

Manock Lual is a filmmaker, community leader, and founder of Prezdential, a

youth-focused organization dedicated to holistic development through sport,

storytelling, and mentorship. With a deep passion for amplifying underrepresented

voices, Manock uses film as a tool to explore themes of identity, fatherhood, trauma,

and healing within the BIPOC community. Couch Potato marks his directorial debut a

deeply personal project that reflects his commitment to authentic storytelling and

social impact. Through his work, Manock continues to bridge art and advocacy,

creating space for reflection, dialogue, and change.

Dir. Statement: Couch Potato was born out of a personal need to confront the quiet

spaces where pain often hides especially in the lives of Black men. As someone who

has worked closely with youth and families, I’ve seen firsthand how trauma, when left

unspoken, can echo across generations. This film explores the emotional distance

that can grow between fathers and sons when grief is buried instead of shared.

I wanted to tell a story that doesn’t rely on spectacle but instead focuses on the

silences, the small gestures, and the weight of what goes unsaid. Couch Potato is

about more than one family it’s about the countless families navigating love through

the lens of loss, masculinity, and survival.

My hope is that this film invites viewers to reflect, to feel, and to start conversations. If

we can name our wounds, we can begin to heal them. And if we can break the cycle,

we can build something new.

Marco Ashley Dixon Decoding the binary of celluloid cinema requires a tree of life that holds a story to

tell incorporated through the cinematic lens. I bounced off the cross-fusion of sound,

light, and live action, crawling through the lens that captured the sequence of

motions that connect the plot. There is always something that subtly inverts our

instinct, enlightens our intuition, and intimidates our attention, setting the initiative

that plays with our eyes and bends or stretches out our head by grabbing our

consciousness and igniting the will to create and brand a stamp and mark of

ourselves, as those who inspire us. Pulling me out of the shadows, all the

experiences I endured over twenty years of working on set ignited in 1987. Rolling

my film celluloid dissecting me, I float invisibly, caught in a frozen time and space,living with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, they are the two combined disabilities that

provoke the general eye of the film industry as they place a Fear in the crew’s mind

as how will I physically and neurologically break the premise as what it takes to

make a film. For me, it started at five months old, when I walked onto the set as a

background actor on the TV Series in 1987. I consumed over twenty years of film

industry protocols, aligned with film camps and art or film centre workshops, and

acquired eighteen years of university studies, earning three degrees and two

certificates, advancing my intelligence in telling stories, navigating the structure of

literature, and utilizing dictionaries and thesauruses in creative writing to release

the plots to publish as words joined together to create the statement, sentence and

online post. Next, I transitioned into a performer, placing my mind into character

and objects that were copyrighted to the page and acted out the scenes placing a

Bachelor’s in Performing Arts to my name which severed the bolt and chain in the

waiting line to fully embrace my internal drive to become a director and producer in

film and unlocking my motive to earn a Bachelor’s in Motion Picture Arts and

Certificate in Cinematography for Film and Video. It fuelled my urge to become a

director, like those known for incredible films —Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino,

Nolan, and many others. My burning light emerged through the inspiration of how

the general individual moved around me, to capturing the shot by positioning the

on-set equipment, and rolling through with fundamental priorities to reel in the

sequence that speaks to you. The intriguing cortex in my consciousness mainframe

that broke the cinematic code is how I live with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and hold

the mind in deciphering film with a scarred brain. No one thought I, with physical

and cerebral damage, would strive to attain the credentials in film and university

studies like I did. Glued to the visual teleprompter of the world across the media and

cinematic spectrum, I was fascinated by how the core of film blended action and

story. By embracing the corner and edge that involves performance, I bent, turned

and shaped into a character, registering how much one needs to stretch out to

perform. I also bleed my eyes out, chained to the screen, consuming the mass load of

scripts, essays, short stories, and reports, while grasping an Associate’s Degree in

Creative Writing. The skeleton of story is the hardest bone of contention to be able in

mastering as when all is born in the realm of the visual spectrum one must harvest

the triangle of cinema proving to your audience by spilling out the words you can

encompass and deliver the live or lens captured performance and solve the maze of

timelines and protocols in rolling camera and preparing the scene. Now, as I write

the title of my book, which is also the name of my short film, I am presenting an

epilogue and an increment based on the first chapter to introduce what is yet to

come in OH… IT NEVER ENDS.

Dir. Statement

Speaking out and playing with words changed the mood of your workday, which was

set for one of the seven days. How do you handle it when OH is the one holding

everything up, crafting a statement or phrase that keeps you bottled up inside? What

is the word that opens the door for you to walk into the rehab centre or call the toll-

free support hotline, spending hours trying to ask a question? Creating this film

explains it all, as the one we want a voice from is never face-to-face with us. Here,

they release the report and an analytical chart of the time wasted asking for their

help. So I introduce the all-mighty one, revealing the side of life you never see. Whilespinning out his eight-track and global social media posts, we’re receiving the roots

and core of life’s disagreements as the souls in every living body keep spilling out

the tagline, erasing our ability to save ourselves, lost in a dimension of limbo, a black

hole or vortex, manipulated into the illusion we call reality, which is fake and made

up to avoid the fundamental factors of reaching our goals and understanding the

signed motives of how we are meant to survive—with a pulse and heartbeat rather

than a flatline, covered up under layers of Mother Nature carrying on until you sign

up to breathe again. Did your OMG ring his bell or toss you aside to deliver an

answer to what is real and fake? OH… IT NEVER ENDS, so let’s watch and see where

you align in the tree of life, the fountain of youth, and Earth’s list of working souls.

Neal Hope (Cinematographer)⁩ is a Barbadian cinematographer and

filmmaker, currently in his final years of a Bachelor's in Motion Picture Arts at

Capilano University.

Neal has worked internationally on projects for BET, CBC Canada, Channel 4

UK, independent documentaries, and commercials.

A certified electrician and completion of the IATSE 891 Light Tech program, he

brings specialized expertise in lighting to his craft. More importantly, Team building and

collaboration is something he’s passionate about, while always being a student in his craft.

Neal is passionate about preserving Caribbean oral history through film.

One of his long-term goals is to support emerging filmmakers in Barbados by

bridging Canadian and Caribbean film communities to bring local stories to the

screen. He is also a proud student member of the Canadian Society of

Cinematographers (CSC).

Director Statement

As the director of 'COHOBBLOPOT,' I envision this as a period piece set in

Vancouver in the 90s. My mission is to infuse the film with a sense of authenticity

and emotional depth drawn from personal experiences. Through the lens of a

fractured family navigating life during this pivotal time, I aim to craft a nuanced

and heartfelt exploration of human relationships, resilience, and personal growth.Having experienced my own journey of overcoming challenges and finding

inspiration in unexpected places, I understand the power of storytelling and how

transform negative experiences into sources of empathy and understanding. By

weaving together the vibrant cultural tapestry of Barbados culture with universal

themes of struggle and triumph, ‘COHOBBLOPOT' seeks to resonate with

audiences on a deeply personal level.

My goal is to create an experience that is authentic and relatable as many of us are

away from our families and our homes. I also want to have en environment we feel

inspired child like in curiosity with a high level of collaboration. Making this film

is about equally about each and every one of our dreams and aspirations of our

futures.

Henry C. King is a Nigerian-Canadian actor, writer, and filmmaker based in Vancouver. His

work explores themes of perseverance, identity, and resilience, often rooted in personal

and cultural experiences. As an actor, he’s appeared in series like Kung Fu, Superman &

Lois, and Honor Society. His latest short film, DONNIE, marks his directorial debut and

highlights his passion for raw, character-driven storytelling in film and television.

Dir. Statement:

“This film was made from a strong desire to tell a story that connected my love for

boxing with my Nigerian roots. It was also fuelled by the passion to create opportunities

for myself and peers to showcase our strengths both in front and behind the camera.

"DONNIE" explores universal themes like Fortitude, Perseverance, Grit and I can't wait

to share it with you.

Like many of the Filmmakers I admire, I can only hope that this film inspires audiences

to fully chase their dreams- no matter the obstacles.”-