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The Toronto-based filmmaker Dominique van Olm and her younger brother Dexter are separated by 13 years and hundreds of miles, so they spend very little time together. In Little Brother – a ‘hybrid of documentary and narrative fiction’ – van Olm takes that reality and turns it into an experiment in directing and bonding. For the project, Dexter flew to Toronto for the first time, and spent four days with his sister. Trailed by a barebones film crew, van Olm dutifully dragged Dexter to places she thought a 12-year-old boy might enjoy – including a pizzeria, an aquarium and a roller rink. The resulting short film, composed of brief, unscripted vignettes from their time together, is an accomplished and refreshingly restrained work. With a constant undercurrent of slight discomfort, subtle humour and very unspoken familial love, it traces the distinctive contours of this particular sibling relationship and the more universal afflictions of adolescence – inscrutable moods, halting communication and a perpetual state of embarrassment while in the company of family.
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
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Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
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Life stages
What Michelangelo’s late-in-life works reveal about his genius – and his humanness
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Biography and memoir
Preserving memories of a Japanese internment camp, and the land where it stood
8 minutes
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Stories and literature
To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best
8 minutes