Cannes Docs

Runtime: 75'

Expected release: July 2025

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: CAD$220,000 (100% in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, sales agents, distributors, buyers, strategic guidance

Synopsis:

Following a collective of oyster farmers on Cortes Island, British Columbia, Concrete Turned to Sand traces the changing intertidal zone as it endures the effects of ocean warming and acidification. Temporal, geographic and ecological scales of perception flow between each other, as the film reveals the transforming landscape and the intertwined livelihoods within it.

Director’s Profile:

Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora are award-winning filmmakers based in Vancouver, BC. Their work investigates the visible and invisible ways in which humans have engraved themselves into the biosphere. Formally, their work is defined by a structural approach to filmmaking, engaging with the optics of cinema while illustrating the experience of labour in dialogue with landscape. Their work has screened at festivals and cinemas including Cinéma du réel, The Walker Art Center, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Open City Documentary Festival, DOXA, and VIFF.

Producer’s Profile:

Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora are award-winning filmmakers based in Vancouver, BC. Their work investigates the visible and invisible ways in which humans have engraved themselves into the biosphere. Formally, their work is defined by a structural approach to filmmaking, engaging with the optics of cinema while illustrating the experience of labour in dialogue with landscape. Their work has screened at festivals and cinemas including Cinéma du réel, The Walker Art Center, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Open City Documentary Festival, DOXA, and VIFF.

Runtime: 120'

Expected release: December 2025

Production stage: Rough Cut

Budget: $45,000 (80% in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, sales, co-producer

Synopsis:

Skin of the Sky is a poetic essay film that drifts through the borderlands, where horses and humans move through circuits of labor, violence, and abandonment. Told in fragments and spectral images, the film lingers at a threshold—where bodies vanish, stories echo, and the visible gives way to what resists being seen.

Director’s Profile:

Andrea Bussmann was born in Toronto, Canada. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology and an MFA in Film Production. She directed He Whose Face Gives No Light (2011) and co-directed Tales of Two Who Dreamt (Berlinale Forum, 2016), which won Best Documentary at the Festival International de Films de Femmes. Her feature Fausto (2018) premiered at Locarno and won Best Latin American Feature at Mar del Plata. That same year, she received the Discovery Award from the Directors Guild of Canada. Her films explore the porous borders between fiction and non-fiction, often weaving literature, myth, and experimental form into narratives shaped by lived encounters. Working across hybrid modes, she engages multispecies relationships, layered temporalities, and liminal states to challenge cinematic conventions and open alternative ways of seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world.

Runtime: 100'

Expected release: May 2026

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: $870,000 (40% in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, sales agents, distributors, buyers, gap financing

Synopsis:

The Production of the World is an archival documentary about the radical art critic John Berger, the CIA’s infiltration of the arts during “cultural Cold War,” and the ways images operate as a battleground for politics. Set against the rise of the modern superpowers and the spectre of nuclear annihilation, it pits Berger against the CIA in a nonfiction espionage thriller about art and politics.

Director’s Profile:

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at Sundance, CPH:DOX, and SXSW. She is the director of the feature films UNION (with Steve Maing), which was shortlisted for an Academy Award, THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES and THE HOTTEST AUGUST, and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. In 2020 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director. She is a recipient of a Chicken & Egg Award, Sundance Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

Producer’s Profile:

Jeff Reichert is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and critic. His films as a director have won awards and screened at major festivals worldwide and include the feature documentaries Gerrymandering, Remote Area Medical, This Time Next Year, and the fiction-documentary hybrid Feast of the Epiphany. He produced American Factory which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. He is also the co–founder and editor of the online film journal Reverse Shot (est. 2003), now a publication of Museum of the Moving Image, and has written for Film Comment and Filmmaker among others.

Runtime: 94'

Expected release: September 2025

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: CAD$670,000 (80% in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Sales agents, distributors, buyers, strategic guidance, festivals

Synopsis:

At Nuxalk Radio, a rinky-dink, ramshackled station on the edge of the world, an inquiry into the disappearance of their sacred fish unearths a deeper truth about the ancestors who vanished before them -unraveling a chilling story buried in Canada’s past.

Director’s Profile:

Banchi Hanuse is a producer/director, National Geographic Explorer and co-founder of the Nuxalk Radio, a station dedicated to keeping the Nuxalk language alive. She directed the short documentaries ‘Cry Rock’ (2010) and ‘Nuxalk Radio’ (2020), as well as the feature-length ‘Aitamaako’tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun’ (2023). Currently in post-production on ‘We Shall Eat When the River is Full,’ she continues to amplify Indigenous stories and advocate for cultural and environmental stewardship.