Fonds F0807 - Ali Kazimi fonds

Ali Kazimi (1961-) is a Toronto-based filmmaker, author, multimedia artist, and educator. He received a Bachelor of Science from St. Stephen’s College at Delhi University in 1982 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hon.) in film and video production from York University in 1987.

As a director and producer, his works include the feature length documentaries Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994), Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (1997), Documenting Dissent (2001), Continuous Journey (2004), Runaway Grooms (2006), Rex Versus Singh (2009), Random Acts of Legacy (2016), and Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence (2022). His films, including those above, have screened at film festivals around the world, and Kazimi received awards for those films, including the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary, the Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, the Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival, Best Director & Best Political Documentary at Hot Docs, audience awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival, and the People’s Choice Award, Planet in Focus, for Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence at the Canadian Environmental Film Festival.

Kazimi has also collaborated on numerous film and television projects as a cinematographer, including Burning Bridges (1984), Screen Smarts (1986), Voice of Our Own (1989), A Song for Tibet (1991), Going to the Extremes: WET (1992-1993), Constructing Reality: Exploring Media Issues in Documentary (1993), After the Bath (1996), A Scattering of Seeds: Passage from India (1997), Colour Blinds (199-?), Bollywood Bound (2001), Dangerous Obsessions: The Stalking Epidemic (2002), The Journey of Lesra Martin (2002), Surviving Extremes (2002), Women and Men Unglued (2003), and Fig Trees (2009).

Kazimi is the author of Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru (2012), which was a finalist for both the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award and the 2013 British Columbia Book Prizes’ Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. In addition to Undesirables, Kazimi has also been published in film and media outlets and publications.

As a multimedia artist, Kazimi has been part of exhibitions at cultural institutions throughout Canada. Some of those exhibitions include Arunuchal: Beyond the Inner Line Exhibit (1989), To|From: BC Electric Railway 100 Years (2012), Komagata Maru Redux Exhibition Prints (2012), Ruptures in Arrival: Art in the Wake of the Komagata Maru Exhibition (2014), and Transformations: Enlightenment in the Digital Age Exhibition (2016). His stereoscopic 3D installation Fair Play is part of the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Kazimi has been a professor at York University in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts since the mid-2000s. Kazimi’s time at York has also involved work in stereoscopic 3D cinema, of which he is one of Canada’s earliest innovators. He was the recipient of a prestigious John Evan Leaders Fund, from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for the Stereoscopic 3D Lab @York (2012–17). He was also the founding filmmaker of the 3D Film Innovation Consortium (3D FLIC), an interdisciplinary academic/industry partnership. His short film Hazardous (2010) was one of the first stereoscopic 3D short dramas in Canada. His stereoscopic 3D installation Oceans Within was part of the site-specific project Land|Slide: Possible Futures (2013) in Markham, Ontario, which was shown again as part of Transformations: Enlightenment in the Digital Age Exhibition mentioned above, at the Ismaili Centre in Toronto in 2016.

Beyond his work as an artist and educator, Kazimi has served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Images Film Festival (1991-1992), as the president of the Independent Film and Video Alliance (1992–1993), as chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus Toronto (1996-1997), as an advisory board member of the journal Rungh: A South Asian Quarterly of Culture, Comment, and Criticism in the 1990s, and as a juror at films festivals around the world including the 2008 Mumbai International Film Festival and the 2008 CIDA Prize for Best Canadian Documentary on International Development.

He was the recipient of the 2019 Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from the University of British Columbia in 2019 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023. Retrospectives for Kazimi and his works have also been held, including at the 2021 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, where he was the festival's spotlight artist for the year. Kazimi has also been selected multiple times in Now Magazine’s annual Best of Toronto publications as the best documentarian in the city.