Call for Proposals: What is Canada?

What is Canada? is a series of short films by and about diverse communities from coast to coast to coast exploring the following three questions: 

• What is community? 
• What is our story? 
• What is Canada?

What is Canada? will shed light on our sense of belonging and identity in communities across this country, from coast to coast to coast. What makes us a community and why? Each community explores their sense of belonging and identity around the above three questions. Each community will showcase its talents and communal beauty in a live gathering that will be produced locally and documented for sharing nationally. The communities will also contribute to a lived-research exploring ideas of belonging and identity on lands that we call Canada. 

What would our communities share? They would co-share their people, wisdom, food, music, dance, sport, recipe for resilience, recipe for a favorite stew and/or a communal secret with each other and with a national audience.

Call for Proposals:

Open to all communities from all across this country, What is Canada? is looking for a Team of 2 to 3 participants, including at least one graduate student, interested in co-producing a multimedia storytelling collaboration of their Community’s story. The selected cohort will receive creative mentorship, production workshops, and continued support towards producing their local stories in their communities that will be documented as individual short films. The program workshops and mentorships will be delivered virtually. Experience in creating any form of media is welcomed but not required.

The selected cohort will be mentored through their creative process, learn various methods of storytelling, frame their narrative through multimedia, produce a short presentation, and participate in a festival premiere of their work with the Global Migration Institute at TMU, under the auspices of the CERC Migration and Bridging Divides research programs. The cohort will contribute to the exploration of within their own communities, including themes of communal identity, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. Participants will receive creative mentorship from Gemini Award-winning filmmaker, scholar, and artist Cyrus Sundar Singh. 

What is Canada? culminates with a national festival of live co-sharing in the fall of 2026. 

Only one application is required from each team. All applications will be reviewed by a selection committee brought together for this project. Producer experience is welcomed but not required. Upon completion of the project, each local team of producers will receive a $1000 honorarium. Producer-Teams will retain full ownership of their final co-creative creations.

What is Canada? is produced by the Global Migration Institute with support from the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration and Bridging Divides research program at Toronto Metropolitan University. This is led by project directors: Anna Triandafyllidou, CERC Migration Chair, and Cyrus Sundar Singh, creative-producer, Gemini Award-winning filmmaker, and scholar.

What is Canada? is the fourth iteration of cross-Canada multimedia projects that began with the inaugural i am… in 2020, Under the Tent in 2022, and WhereWeStand in 2024. As identity and belonging are not fixed but ebb, flow and evolve as the land beneath us shifts, these projects helped explore diverse experiences of rootedness and displacement and inspired creative outputs. What is Canada?, reflects the continuing search by closing the circle from i to we to us and explores our communal sense of belonging or not-belonging recognizing the nation’s racial and cultural diversity that promotes the inclusive and equal participation of all citizens. Our collective diversity has brought enthusiasm as well as disappointment, equity and inequality, and community and exclusion, especially around Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization.