Six films. Two terms. Free campus screenings followed by discussion — a collaboration between the Ethnographic Research & Practice Lab and the Anthropology Affiliation at Mount Royal University.
The program moved deliberately across documentary, drama, family film, political thriller, and stop-motion animation. The screening posters establish a common format: free evening screenings followed by discussion, with three films in each term.
Each film opens a different social field. The prompts below are offered as interpretive discussion lenses derived from the films and their official descriptions, rather than as a record of any single post-screening conversation.
Sugarcane follows an investigation into abuse and deaths at St. Joseph's Mission Indian residential school near Williams Lake, British Columbia, while attending closely to survivors, descendants, family histories, and the intergenerational consequences of forced assimilation.
Sony describes Otto Anderson as a widower who no longer sees purpose in his life after the loss of his wife. His suicidal crisis is repeatedly interrupted by the arrival of a new family next door, and the film turns toward grief, friendship, neighbourliness, and unexpected forms of family.
A Québec classic about two groups of children who turn their winter holiday into an escalating battle over a snow-and-ice fort. Attraction Distribution describes the film as a comedy about friendship, rivalry, and solidarity — a playful war game whose consequences eventually exceed the game itself.
Based on the story of Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi, Queen of Katwe follows a girl from Katwe whose talent for chess opens new possibilities. Disney foregrounds the support of family and community alongside Phiona's growing confidence and determination.
Set in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film follows a Stasi officer assigned to covertly monitor a playwright and his actress partner. Surveillance becomes an intimate ethical problem as the observer's relationship to the people he is watching begins to change.
Del Toro and Gustafson's stop-motion reimagining relocates the familiar story to Mussolini-era Italy. The film places a unruly wooden child within the rise of fascism, making obedience, authority, war, mortality, parenthood, and the value of disobedience central to its retelling.
The Social Issues Film Series uses shared viewing as a starting point rather than an endpoint. Across the 2025–26 program, films moved from residential-school violence in British Columbia to neighbourhood grief, childhood conflict, chess and social mobility in Kampala, Stasi surveillance in East Berlin, and fascist Italy refracted through stop-motion animation.
What holds the series together is not a single genre or issue but a commitment to watching socially consequential stories in public — and then staying in the room to talk about them.
