5th Annual Spotlight on Academics

5th Annual Spotlight on Academics

Spotlight on Academics provides educators and discerning viewers with carefully selected specialty items under one small roof. Our judges are filmmakers and academics, and our audience is composed of people who want to learn through film. We market online to thousands of faculty at universities in several countries and we also open our doors to the public. This provides filmmakers with a targeted audience for potential sales and it provides viewers with access to a specialty boutique for an affordable price.

Spotlight on Academics is a film festival that recognizes the value of using film as a teaching tool and we are dedicated to presenting films that are suitable for use in post-secondary classrooms. Mostly, these are documentary films that are less than 90 minutes in length, but we are open to films in any format and on any subject. Films can also be in any language provided they come with English and/or French subtitles.

The Spotlight on Academics festival is held annually in Thunder Bay, Ontario and it is also streamed online through researchtv.ca to ensure the broadest possible audience.

Thunder Bay is located on Lake Superior between Toronto, Ontario, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, north-east of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it is serviced by an international airport. Be sure to check out www.thunderbay.ca for more information about the city and region we call home.

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5th Annual Spotlight on Academics
  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: JACQUELINE MITELMAN

    00:24:38|Australia|Directed by Fiona Cochrane

    Seven different Australian photographers, each with a significant body of work and each with a different photographic style: JACQUELINE MITELMAN is a portrait photographer who has lived and worked in Melbourne apart from a period living in France. ...

  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: ASHLEY GILBERTSON

    00:25:29| Australia|Directed by Fiona Cochrane

    Seven different Australian photographers, each with a significant body of work and each with a different photographic style: Ashley Gilbertson is a photojournalist.

    Born In Australia, Ashley now lives and works in New York. In his teens Ashley sta...

  • Snowdrops for the Bairns

    00:25:12|United States|Directed by Donna Dees

    In 1996, after a horrific school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, a couple of mums and a tabloid newspaper launch campaigns to make the UK safer for all. Twenty-five years later, these Scottish local heroes reflect back on these unprecedented achieve...

  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: EMMANUEL SANTOS

    00:26:57| Australia|Directed by Fiona Cochrane

    Seven different Australian photographers, each with a significant body of work and each with a different photographic style: Emmanuel Santos is an art and documentary photographer.

    Born on an island in the Philippines, Emmanuel was a photographer...

  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: RICKY MAYNARD

    00:22:30|Australia|Directed byFiona Cochrane

    An Indigenous Tasmanian photographer, Ricky started as a darkroom technician at the age of 16. In viewing the racist treatment of Indigenous people in the past via colonial photos, Ricky started questioning the photographer’s role, the influence of th...

  • This is Somewhere Safe

    00:15:59|Directed by Greg Scott

    This film documents the inception and operation of the first-ever unsanctioned, peer-led, supervised drug injection facility in an unnamed American city.

  • Unveiling Earth's Climate Secrets

    00:03:38|Austria|Directed by Gina Mosely

    Beneath Greenland’s vast ice sheet lies a hidden archive of Earth’s climate history, one that stretches back hundreds of thousands of years. This short documentary follows the cutting-edge world of paleoclimate research in Greenland, where scientists deco...

  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: JOHN STREET

    00:24:30|Australia|Directed by Fiona Cochrane

    Born in the UK John spent the first 15 years of his life in and out of different orphanages. He remembers light being an important thing to him as he lay in fields as a child, looking up at the sky. John subsequently became a merchant seaman, then re...

  • The Radiant Screen

    00:47:17|Netherlands| Directed by Ine Lamers

    The film follows L., a filmmaker, as she journeys through the vast red Siberian landscape, circling the enigmatic closed city of Ж (Zjeh) Железного́рск / Zheleznogorsk. Founded in the 1950s as a secret military scientific research center, this town wa...

  • Maestro Roman Toi Beautiful songs I dedicate to you

    01:27:00|Canada|Directed by Kalli Paakspuu

    Germany disbands their radio choirs for their war effort and Estonian composer and conductor Roman Toi gets a rare opportunity to introduce Estonian music to the world.He organizes a choir of exiled opera singers in Poland and broadcasts news and musi...

  • The other side of the other

    00:52:03|Rita de Cácia Oenning Da Silva, Kurt Shaw

    Children from the favelas of Recife make a movie about what they imagine life to be for middle class “apartment kids,” while kids from the middle class make a film about what they imagine life to be like in the favela. As they show they movies t...

  • THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT: MEREDITH O’SHEA

    00:23:00|Australia|Directed by Fiona Cochrane

    Born into a working class family in Melbourne, Meredith’s father chose to move them to very outer suburban greenery and freedom. She preferred horse-riding to school, but became interested in film and photography. She was scooped up by THE AGE as soo...

  • Empire Writes Back

  • The Doctrine

    01:23:00|United States|Directed by Gwendolen Cates

    THE DOCTRINE is a feature-length documentary film about the Doctrine of Discovery that follows a group of Indigenous youth in Minneapolis/St.Paul who decide to request a meeting at the Vatican to explain how the 15th-century Doctrine has impacte...

  • Adonis Unadorned- Stories of Me

    00:53:00|Canada|Directed by Dalibor

    Adonis Unadorned: Stories of Me is a film portrait of Don Lowe—a writer from the Greek island of Hydra, and a fellow Artist and a long-time friend of Leonard Cohen. Through ten select stories, told by Don himself, the film provides an intimate account of some ...

  • Báaxpee: This Ground

    00:29:42|United States|Directed by Robin Starbuck

    Báaxpee: This Ground, is a lyrical and intimate documentary that traces the life and spiritual legacy of Ben Cloud, revered medicine chief of the Crow/Apsaalooke Nation and central figure in the sacred Sun Dance tradition. Far more than a portrai...

  • Greenland: A Geological Journey through Time

    00:05:26|Austria|Directed by Gina Mosely

    Greenland: A Geological Journey Through Time is an awe-inspiring documentary that unveils the hidden story beneath the ice of the world’s largest island. Spanning nearly four billion years, this sweeping cinematic journey traces Greenland’s transformation...

  • Tipping Point: From Local Protection to the Global Governance of Biodiversity

    00:10:05|Directed by Marjolaine Lamontagne

    Tipping Point: From Local Protection to the Global Governance of Biodiversity is a short documentary film in French (with English subtitles) exploring the involvement of local governments (cities and regions) and civil society organizations in the globa...

  • Digital dilemma

    00:18:11 |Directed by Stephane Kaas

    In a world driven by data, algorithms and AI, Tamar Sharon asks the question: does digitalisation work for us, or against us?

    From homework to grocery shopping and from healthcare to farm life – the human experience is changed drastically by the seemingly un...

  • Incredible India / Incredible Bharat EP.1 Majuli: Away from tourist route

    00:50:00|India|Directed by Mikhail Alekseenkov

    This film is about the world’s largest inhabited river island. The island is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. Despite the fact that the island is located in a remote and inaccessible place, where, in many ways, modern civilization and tourism...

  • Could Try Harder

    00:10:40|United Kingdom|Directed by Sophie Jackson

    10 contributors are filmed reading their old school reports for the first time in many years. Funny, insightful and poignant, the readers respond to the memories of their teen selves captured on sheets of thin paper with hand written teachers c...