"I came away from the 64th edition of LFF thinking hard about what it takes to make a genuinely emancipatory movie — or to tell a tale of freedom that is true to its own espoused values. Sometimes the answer can be deceptively simple. In Raoul Peck’s words, “We don’t have to re-invent the wheel — there are plenty of wheels!” A.S.M. Kobayashi’s elegant and hard-hitting short film File No. 2034 is an example of how going back and simply looking at the past, and an archive, with fresh eyes, can be transformative. Kobayashi is an artist who has spent her career reinterpreting other people’s found objects, but in confronting her family’s past through a single microfilm file, she manages to perform a radical reckoning with Canadian history. The restitution of misappropriated artefacts; the re-situation and reinterpretation of an archive; reviving the voices of people, objects and spirits that have been silent for too long — these are impulses which for me, united some of most interesting and liberatory work at LFF. "
—Nasheed Qamar Faruqi