Filmi 23!
Filmi Toronto’s South Asian Film Festival – 23 Years!
December 6th – 7th, 2025
Stay tuned for some great films!
21st Filmi: Toronto’s South Asian film festival
Harbourfront Centre
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0 A Birthday Surprise
Title: A Birthday Surprise
Premiere: Toronto Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 12
A Birthday Surprise
An Indian boy Rahul is waiting for his birthday surprise from his girlfriend Melissa. Melissa has promised to Rahul that she will travel from Paris, France to give him a birthday surprise. Rahul receives a package for his Birthday. Package contains a GPS that is pre-programmed so that he can navigate to the surprise. He finds more and more clues on his way which eventually turns into something disturbing. End of the day, did he meet Melissa? was it a real surprise?
Director – Praveen Raj Ganesan
Praveen is a Director, actor, editor and producer living in Pickering, Canada. Born in Sri Lanka to Indian Parents, raised in India, Salem, Tamil Nadu. By the age of 18 he had travelled all over India and the Philippines to study Aviation. He holds a Commercial Pilot license from the Philippines.
Acting, directing was always a passion for him from his early childhood days and that lead to a lot of stage plays and a few TV shows. Stage plays that he directed and acted in his school days won alot of awards between the year 2003 and 2005. To support his family financially he studied IT computer Networking he moved to Canada in December 2010. After finishing his studies he started working as an IT Network Security Consultant. This did not make him stop chasing his dream. He started networking and built his own team to produce short films and commercials. He learned photography, cinematography and editing to support his films. He is 9 to 5 as an IT geek and the rest of the time he has worked, learned and made movies. After about 5 years of working full time he quit is job to start his own IT, media and Digital Marketing company Kural Inc. so that he has more time on hand to make films.
His first Short film in Canada was Ethiri The Enemy(2015), a tamil Short film. In 2016, 2017 he founded Thamziha foundation a nonprofit to help Indian farmers that he has featured in a lot of political awareness videos. Some of his videos has earned around 1 Million views in Facebook.
FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/nnthamizha/videos/278548585926803/
2017 he has worked in the following short films
Mr Moden (2017) – Director, Producer
Happy Birthday Rahul (2017) – Director, Actor, Producer, Editor
Lecture (2017) – Actor, Producer
My Favourite Dinner (2017) – Director, Producer
Dumped (2017) – Director, Producer
Ethiri (2015) – Director, Actor, Producer, Editor (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPJ_tLC8mQ)
His first feature film is in the preproduction phase and expected to be released by late Summer 2018
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0 Doori
Title: Dhoori
Premiere: Toronto Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 8
In a strange, unfamiliar place, Gurjit tries to navigate life with ‘the man’. Homesick,
isolated, yet hopeful, Gurjit tries tackling a mundane existence, and at the same time tries to appease a companion she knows nothing of. What is greater, the distance between her new home and the life she previously lived, or the distance between her and ‘the man’?
Director: Sumit Judge
Talent and writer with the People of the Community YouTube channel. This includes producing and speaking on a weekly podcast, in addition to writing, acting and directing comedic sketches and live charity roasts. Wrote, directed and produced two short films. One of which won the Air Canada Award at the 2015 Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, leading to the film being screened on Air Canada flights in May 2016. Other gigs include script supervisor and assistant director on various short films. Also acted as the short-film coordinator for the Mosaic South Asian Film
Festival held in Mississauga, Ontario in 2017.
A member of the South Asian diaspora using film and comedy to bring light to untold stories within our community. Moreover, working towards completing a legal degree in the hopes of utilizing said degree to both fund my filmmaker aspirations and work towards securing justice for downtrodden members of society.
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0 Faceoff
Title: Faceoff
Premiere: Toronto Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 5
http://taalproductions.com/index.html
Faceoff starts by capturing the fine details of the instruments, the fibres and textures of the Tabla, Mridangam and Violin. One at a time we see hands playing and slowly moving to reveal the faces of the players. The beginning depicts a feeling of solitude, slightly dark and dramatic, musicians in their own space.
As the music starts to build up we see a few glimpses of a beautiful dancer, sitting almost like a statue clad in a bright crimson dress.
She slowly starts to move by making a few hand gestures, a ritual to prepare her dance.
Although we don’t see the players and dancers in the same space, there is a feeling they are aware of each other.
The dancer looks as if through a veil to see who is on the other side. The players are getting prepared for something.
As the music intensifies the dancer turns into their space where they begin to faceoff into a final crescendo.
The ending signifies the last final detail of the mudra (hand gesture) and brings back the close ups from the beginning of the film.
As in Indian classical music the ending also signifies the beginning of something new.
The look and surrounding of the film is kept minimalistic and stark, with the intention to bring out the beauty of the instruments and the art form itself.
Director Biography – Melissa Das-Arp
Melissa Das-Arp was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and watched her father create storyboards, direct, produce and edit documentaries.
When she moved to Canada she became involved in North Indian music (tabla) and started producing promotional videos.
Now Melissa works mainly on creating storyboards, directing and producing videos for music and dance.
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0 My Favorite Dinner
Title: My Favourite Dinner
Premiere: Toronto Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 3
A stoic couple are concerned about the health of the younger generation and how that will affect their meal quality.
Director Biography – Praveen Raj Ganesan
Praveen is a Director, actor, editor and producer living in Pickering, Canada. Born in Sri Lanka to Indian Parents, raised in India, Salem, Tamil Nadu. By the age of 18 he had travelled all over India and the Philippines to study Aviation. He holds a Commercial Pilot license from the Philippines.
Acting, directing was always a passion for him from his early childhood days and that lead to a lot of stage plays and a few TV shows. Stage plays that he directed and acted in his school days won alot of awards between the year 2003 and 2005. To support his family financially he studied IT computer Networking he moved to Canada in December 2010. After finishing his studies he started working as an IT Network Security Consultant. This did not make him stop chasing his dream. He started networking and built his own team to produce short films and commercials. He learned photography, cinematography and editing to support his films. He is 9 to 5 as an IT geek and the rest of the time he has worked, learned and made movies. After about 5 years of working full time he quit is job to start his own IT, media and Digital Marketing company Kural Inc. so that he has more time on hand to make films.
His first Short film in Canada was Ethiri The Enemy(2015), a tamil Short film. In 2016, 2017 he founded Thamziha foundation a nonprofit to help Indian farmers that he has featured in a lot of political awareness videos. Some of his videos has earned around 1 Million views in Facebook.
FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/nnthamizha/videos/278548585926803/
2017 he has worked in the following short films
Mr Moden (2017) – Director, Producer
Happy Birthday Rahul (2017) – Director, Actor, Producer, Editor
Lecture (2017) – Actor, Producer
My Favourite Dinner (2017) – Director, Producer
Dumped (2017) – Director, Producer
Ethiri (2015) – Director, Actor, Producer, Editor (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPJ_tLC8mQ)
His first feature film is in the preproduction phase and expected to be released by late Summer 2018
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0 Nigel and Percy go to Niagara
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0 Stealing Vows
Title: Stealing Vows
Premiere: Theatrical Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 9
www.stealingvows.com
Four colleagues in the wedding business have all reached a crossroads in their respected careers. None of them intended to be locked into a life of wedding service monotony, but their career trajectories took a U-turn and led them into the humbling embrace of their home city, Brampton. The opportunity for one of them to elicit payback on a gold-digging ex-girlfriend emerges, kick-starting an unbelievably clever, yet morally wrong crime spree that could ultimately help a drug-abusing wedding emcee, a would-be master chef, a spineless decorator and a talented photographer financially escape their sad foreseeable futures.
In the spirit of The Italian Job and The Usual Suspects, this film – set in the suburbs of Toronto in the late 1990’s – follows the lives of four colleagues and friends who set out on dangerous path to risk all they have for a shot at a better life.
Director: Bobby S. Brown
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0 Simple Simon
Title: Simple Simon
Premiere: Toronto Premiere | Country: Canada | Year: 2018 | Runtime: 8
Synopsis:
The parents of a young girl are dismayed when she begins bullying her imaginary friend.
Director: Maninder Chana
An award-winning writer, director, producer and actor, Maninder Chana
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0 2018 Filmi Schedule
November 10, 2018
7:30PM
Simple Simon
Stealing Vows
Nigel and Percy go to Niagara
My Favorite Dinner
Faceoff
Trust issues
Dhoori
ClownLove
Black Birthday
Dark Nun
Heart
Stall
Priya
A Birthday Surprise
November 11, 2018
12:00PM
Panel Discussion:
Emerging Filmmakers
3:00PM
Working Lunch
Do we belong?
Lake Shore Drive
7:30PM
Candyland
No Man’s Land
Raising the Bar
Blindspot
Arithmetic
Maternal
Green
Loretta’s flowers
Bad Boys Video
Insulin and Cake
Dust to Dust
Becoming Leela
About The Sharma’s
23rd Filmi: Toronto's South Asian Film Festival Dec 6-7 2025 