A Thousand Colors
directed by
Nadia Louis-Desmarchais
Ontario
Adopted by a white family in Quebec, a young mixed-race filmmaker sets out to understand the painful legacy of being abandoned by her Haitian birth mother—who died before they could reunite. Haunted by unanswered questions and a deep sense of loss, she turns to home videos, personal stories, and the unspoken truths buried within her family to piece together a deeply layered narrative. What emerges is a lyrical, unflinching exploration of identity, race, and belonging, where memory becomes resistance, silence speaks the loudest, and abandonment leaves an invisible mark that endures.
Programmer's Notes
Using her family's archives, Director Nadia Louis-Desmarchais explores her identity through memories, family stories, and what remains untold. Adopted by a white family in Quebec, she traces her journey of self-discovery alongside the complicated feelings of abandonment surrounding her biological Haitian mother.
Anchored by Louis-Desmarchais' intimate voice-over, the documentary moves between childhood home videos, family archives, online research, and fragments of stories shared by loved ones. As she searches for traces of her mother and the culture she was separated from as an infant, she confronts the shame, anger, and uncertainty that have shaped her relationship with her Black and mixed-race identity.
Over seven years, the filmmaker transforms these fragments of the past into a deeply personal exploration of the making and unmaking of memory. The archives become a way to revisit a partially remembered childhood, while filmmaking becomes part of her process of understanding who she is.
Poetic and introspective, the film asks how we can belong to a story we do not remember, and what it means to create our own narrative to understand where we come from and who we want to become.
Programmer, Safia Abdigir
Cast
About the Director
Nadia Louis-Desmarchais is an award-winning Afro-feminist filmmaker whose intimate and political work gives voice to marginalized narratives. She has directed several acclaimed fiction and documentary short films. Director of the web series The Meteorites, which won a Gémeaux Award for the production that most distinguished itself internationally, she has just completed her first feature-length documentary, A Thousand Colors, selected for DOC NYC and awarded both the Audience Award and the Student Jury Award at RIDM.
Running Time
1:28:00
Language
French
Country
Canada
Producers
Paola Arriagada Nunez, Orlando Arriagada Nunez
Province
Quebec
