DocNow 2025 Festival

Still, Take Care, Till Springtime, Dir. Yi Shi

17th DocNow Festival

June 2 – 28, 2025
Various Locations, Toronto

DocNow 2025 is right around the corner. Scheduled for June 2025, Toronto Metropolitan University’s 17th annual Documentary Media Master of Fine Arts festival is a student-run, non-profit showcase featuring twenty diverse student-created works in film, photography, and gallery installations. The featured pieces explore a wide range of themes, including intergenerational strife, Indigenous research methodologies, metamorphosis, war, and the influence of psychoanalysis on documentary practices.

Film screenings will run at Paradise on Bloor from June 9 to June 23, 2025, and exhibitions will run from June 3 to August 7, 2025. Full descriptions of the films and tickets can be found here. Exhibitions are open to the public, and detailed programming can be found below.

As a student-run, non-profit festival, DocNow relies on every contribution, large or small, to support the success and careers of its artists. Your support has a direct and immediate impact on the students’ ability to screen their work and will have a lasting effect on the educational and professional endeavours of their future documentary practice. To support the festival, please consider donating through our secure donation page.

For festival updates and behind-the-scenes material, follow @docnowfestival on Instagram or visit docnowfestival.ca.

Film Screenings

Night 1 | 17th Annual DocNow Festival
Paradise on Bloor
June 9, 2025, Doors open @ 5:30pm
Stories of migration, borders, and dearest families (by blood or by choice).

Night 2 | 17th Annual DocNow Festival
Paradise on Bloor
June 16, 2025, Doors open @ 5:30pm
Stories of healing, resistance, and some next-level-decision-making.

Night 3 | 17th Annual DocNow Festival
Paradise on Bloor
June 23, 2025, Doors open @ 5:30pm
Stories of friendship, ethics, and… wait, what exactly is this?

Exhibitions

Like the Seams of a Coat
Artspace TMU
Opening Reception: June 6, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm

Like the Seams of a Coat investigates the role that landscape photography played in the processes of nation-building and the construction of a Canadian visual identity rooted in the myth of superabundance. Alexander Henderson (1831-1913) was a Montreal-based photographer who documented transnational railway projects in the years after Confederation, tasked with making images of major benchmarks in their country-wide expansion. Growing alongside a young nation, photography’s development as a commercial, social and representational tool determined how Canada was seen. By presenting scenes as natural and given, 19th-century landscape images “mask(ed) how labour binds human and nonhuman nature.” Following in Henderson’s footsteps, my images push back against idealized representations of land seen in commercial photography of the time, identifying sites of human intervention in nature, the residual effects of resource extraction, and traces of colonial violence.

Oak Tree | Human
A Space Gallery
Opening Reception: June 6, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm

Oak Tree | Human is the artist’s contemplation through time and space to communicate with the two-hundred-year-old tree that lives in front of their home – a relationship that is embodied in a visual and auditory experience. As co-author of the process, the Oak Tree invites us to re-imagine our connection with trees through an animist lens that regards human and non-human in partnership. Using sound recordings, video, sculpture, experimental analogue and digital photography, this multi-documentation through human technology explores the tree’s deeper existence beyond its physical form. The texture and grooves of the tree bark become a sound wave; the leaves, catkins and acorns imprint the film emulsion, and the pinhole photographs consider seeing through the tree’s eyes. Each process contributes to sensing the Oak’s presence.

No. 14 Village
A Space Gallery
Opening Reception: June 6, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm

In 2021, it was declared that China had achieved “comprehensive poverty alleviation” and a “moderately prosperous society,” a proclamation that effectively removed rural hardship from the media agenda. Meanwhile, an alternate narrative emerged online: one where influencers aestheticized rural life, portraying it as idyllic while glossing over economic struggles. Both of these representations erase the realities of those who remain in the countryside, reinforcing systemic neglect while distorting public perception. No. 14 Village explores the lived experiences of one such community — the artist’s mother’s hometown — where she lived with relatives who work the land. Through interviews and observational footage, the artist challenges the romanticized depictions of rural life and highlights the resilience of those left behind by modernization. Rooted in familial ties, this project critiques state narratives while offering an intimate perspective on the sociopolitical disparities shaping rural China. Blending domestic ethnography, participatory storytelling and sensory media, the work examines inequality, cultural transformation and perseverance. By interweaving personal experience with larger systemic issues, immersive narratives that encourage critical engagement with the complexities of rural life are created.

On Being Despised
The Image Centre, Student Gallery
Opening Reception: June 18, 2025 | 6pm – 8pm

On Being Despised reimagines a second Eden through the lens of history and personal archive. In the works presented, Toronto-based artist Rebecca Wood re-exposes and layers her late maternal grandmother’s wartime images with contemporary photographs of garden spaces linked to Virginia Woolf — the source of the exhibition’s title. Through the use of collage and homemade botanical developers, Wood explores themes of war, gender fluidity and creative transformation. At this time of intersecting crises, Wood invites us into a speculative garden, a space for metamorphosis, healing, and the layering of stories.

Unauthorized Personnel Allowed
A Space Gallery
Opening Reception: June 20, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm

Unauthorized Personnel Allowed is a photographic series documenting the Ontario Line subway’s construction, rapidly reshaping the Don River’s Lower and Western branches, and the neighbourhoods of Thorncliffe Park, Flemingdon Park, and around the now-shuttered Ontario Science Centre. Through repeatedly walking the landscape and responding to its continual changes, I use the camera as a mnemonic device to process and archive the active construction and redevelopment of the land. Unauthorized Personnel Allowed questions how the surrounding landscape is documented while in flux, and how the photographic process has historically been used to obfuscate the changes brought upon by human dominance over nature.

In/Security
A Space Gallery
Opening Reception: June 20, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm

In/security draws from both the lived experiences of being unhoused and as a witness to the difficulties of being precariously housed, confronting the issue faced by unhoused people in Canada. This project explores the subjects of belonging, community, security, insecurity and affordable housing.This is an experience shared by many African immigrants working as security guards. The participants in this project hold their shoes in front of their faces to conceal their identities, thereby expressing how widespread these struggles are, and how they’re often hidden from the public gaze. The shoes held by each participant are their individual work shoes. Each pair of shoes bears the marks of their struggles and personal journey in pursuit of a home. The artist shares a similar social-economic background with the participants.

Screenings and exhibitions are open to the public!

For ongoing festival updates, follow @docnowfestival on Instagram.

Contact:
Natalie Vaughan-Graham
nvaughangraham@torontomu.ca