Kanaval

Henri
Pardo

Born in New Brunswick to Hatian parents, Henri Pardo is the writer and director of Kanaval. The film won the Amplify Voices Award for best BIPOC Canadian Feature at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival

It is 1975, during the carnival celebrations of a small Haitian port town nine-year-old Rico delights in the festivities but returns home to find his schoolteacher mother under attack. They flee together to rural Quebec where they are taken in by a kindly couple. Struggling to adjust to Canada, with its snow, racist villagers, and school bullies, Rico begins to slip into an imaginary world, inventing a half-animal, half-human friend from Haitian myth who becomes his guiding light.