Fonds F0743 - Regent Park Film Festival fonds

The Regent Park Film Festival is Toronto's longest running free-of-charge community film festival, dedicated to showcasing local and international independent works relevant to inner-city life. In 2003, Chandra Siddan, a filmmaker and student in the York University’s “Regent Park Community Education Program”, founded the RPFF as an alternative educational setting for an assignment with support from her instructor Jeff Kugler, principal of Nelson Mandela Park Public School, who offered his school as the venue for the event, and Prof. Harry Smaller who garnered broadly-based support from the University.

For seven years, the festival screened at the Nelson Mandela Park Public School before moving to the Lord Dufferin Public School for 2010 and 2011. On the tenth anniversary in 2012, the festival and its offices moved into the Daniels Spectrum cultural hub and started delivering year-round programming such as workshops and community screenings.

In 2007, a year after RPFF incorporated, Siddan stepped down as Festival Director and was replaced by Karin Haze until 2010, Richard Fung in 2011, Ananya Ohri from 2012 to 2018, and Tendisai Cromwell as of 2018.

In 2017, the RPFF embarked on a three-year home movie archive project titled “Home Made Visible” after receiving funding from the Canadian Council for the Arts New Chapter. The three-part nationwide project digitized home movies from the Indigenous and visible minority communities and donated a selection of clips for preservation, commissioned six artist films, and exhibited the artworks and selected home movie clips across Canada to encourage discussions around diverse histories and futures.