Ninth Floor (Canada)  

One look at Stephen Harper’s Facebook page tells you that Canadians aren’t all as goodhearted as we like to think we are. But racism has rarely been as hideously declarative as it was during the so-called Computer Riot in 1969 at Montreal’s Sir George Williams College, which later became part of Concordia.

When black students, mostly of West Indian background, complained of systematic discrimination by one professor (who still remains an enigma), the school responded in increasingly confusing ways, fuelling the era’s revolutionary fervour and culminating in destruction probably caused by police agents.

In Vancouver director Mina Shum’s first foray into doc making, her impressive stylistic choices sometimes draw too much attention to themselves, but the overall effect is a powerful and essentially poetic challenge to a culture still not quite over its primitive fear of the “others” who, in fact, make this a country.