• Cinema & Media Arts

  • Ali Kazimi

  • Professor

Ali Kazimi profile image

E akazimi@yorku.ca
W Personal Website

EDUCATION

BSc (St. Stephen's, Delhi), BFA (York),
D.Litt (h.c.) (UBC)


AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Documentary
Cinematography
Film Editing
South Asia

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Ali Kazimi (pronounced Ka-Zim-E) is filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. In 2019 he received the  Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa from the University of British Columbia. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

His critically acclaimed films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning national and international honours and awards. His awards include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Best Director & Best Political Documentary, Hot Docs and Audience Awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival. His most recent feature documentary Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence premiered at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in May 2023. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Planet In Focus Canadian International Environmental Film Festival, and was screened as part of the prestigious Front Light program at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam.

Kazimi’s retrospectives count the 1998 Images Festival of Independent Film & Video (Toronto), Pacific Film Archives/Berkeley Art Museum (2006), Mumbai International Film Festival (2008),ViBGYOR International Documentary Film Festival in Thissur, India, (2009), and the Artist Spotlight at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (2021).  On the small screen, his productions have been broadcast nationally (CBC, TVO, Vision TV, CBC Newsworld, Knowledge Network and SCN) and internationally (Channel 4/UK, PBS/USA).

Kazimi has also served as cinematographer for productions such as the Genie Award-winning A Song for Tibet (1992), My Niagara (1993), Bollywood Bound (2001) and The Journey of Lesra Martin (2002), Fig Trees (2008) and Rex versus Singh (2009).

Kazimi is the recipient of a prestigious John R. Evans Leaders Fund, from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to set up the Stereoscopic 3D Lab @York. He was the founding filmmaker in 3DFLIC (3D Film Innovation Consortium) an inter-disciplinary academic/industry partnership (2009-12). His stereoscopic 3D installations have been shown in galleries across Canada, and one of them Fair Play (2014) is now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

In 2012, Kazimi authored the nationally acclaimed book, Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru – An Illustrated History (Douglas & McIntyre) which was a finalist for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award and the 2013 BC Book Prizes (Roedrick Haig-Brown Regional Prize).

He has mentored and supervised several graduate students whose thesis films have received critical acclaim, among them Kathleen Mullen – Breathtaking (2010), Jorge Lozano – Moving Still-still life (2010), Zaheed Mawani –Three Walls (2011). Mawani’s thesis film,  won awards in Oberhausen and Atlanta and was nominated for Best Short Documentary for the Canadian Screen Awards (2013); Vicki Lean’s documentary Until the Last River won the Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming at DOXA (2015) and was nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social/Political Documentary, Canadian Screen Awards 2017.

He served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2016, and was promoted to in 2022. In 2021, Ali Kazimi was elected as a Senior Fellow at Massey College

Films

Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence (2022)

Random Acts of Legacy (2016)

Hazardous (2011)

Rex versus Singh (2009)

Runaway Grooms (2005)

Continuous Journey (2004)

Documenting Dissent (2001)

Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (1997)

Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994)

Installations

Unseen (2020)

Fair Play (2014)

Oceans Within (2012)

Publications

Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru (Douglas & McIntrye, 2012)

Cinema & Media Arts

People of AMPD

Technical Staff

Michael Irwin

Contract Faculty

Karen Walton

Contract Faculty

Thomas Wallner

Contract Faculty

Michael Trommer

Contract Faculty

Jonathan Silveira

Contract Faculty

Brigitte Sachse

Contract Faculty

Steve Sanguedolce

Contract Faculty

Jim Munroe

Contract Faculty

JP Marchant

Contract Faculty

Jenn McGouran

Contract Faculty

Caroline Klimek

Contract Faculty

Shant Joshi

Contract Faculty

Wendy Donnan

Contract Faculty

Meagan Byrne

Contract Faculty

Bazir Adrienne

Contract Faculty

Erik Anderson

Contract Limit Appointment

Matthew I Thompson

Assistant Professor

Fabio Montanari

Assistant Professor

Sue Johnson

Assistant Professor

Hector Centeno Garcia

Contract Faculty

Morgan Fics

Assistant Professor

Moussa Djigo

Contract Faculty

Bill Robertson

Contract Faculty

Michelle Szemberg

Contract Faculty

Matthew Miller

Contract Faculty

Francisca Duran

Administrative Staff

Yukari Hayakawa

Associate Professor

Michael Darroch

Administrative Staff

Gilbert Kwong

Administrative Staff

Stephanie Adamson

Administrative Staff

Lauren O'Brien

Technical Staff

Marcos Arriaga

Contract Faculty

William Robertson

Contract Faculty

Vladimir Paskaljevic

Contract Faculty

Matthew Johnson

Contract Faculty

Chris Romeike

Associate Professor

Patricio Dávila

Contract Faculty

Tony Nardi

Technical Staff

Jon Hedley

Technical Staff

Claudius Pinto

Associate Professor

Ingrid Veninger

Assistant Professor

Taien Ng-Chan

Associate Professor

Mary Bunch

Associate Professor

Manfred Becker

Associate Professor

Kenneth Rogers

Contract Faculty

Rebecca Schechter

Contract Faculty

Steve Munro

Contract Faculty

Carol McBride

Sessional Assistant Professor

Gillian Helfield

Contract Faculty

Maureen Dorey

Professor Emeritus

Antonin Lhotsky

Professor Emeritus

Jim Fisher

Professor Emeritus

Evan W. Cameron

Associate Professor

Michael Zryd

Professor Emerita

Suzie Young

Associate Professor

Howard Wiseman

Professor Emerita

Renate H. Wickens

Professor Emerita

Colleen Wagner

Associate Professor

Temenuga Trifonova

Professor Emerita

Marie Rickard

Associate Professor

John McCullough

Professor

Janine Marchessault

Professor

Brenda Longfellow

Professor

Ali Kazimi

Professor Emeritus

Philip Hoffman

Associate Professor

Sharon Hayashi

Associate Professor

John Greyson

Associate Professor

Laurence Green

Professor Emeritus

Scott Forsyth

Professor

Caitlin Fisher

Professor Emeritus

Seth Feldman

Associate Professor

Barbara Evans

Associate Professor

Tereza Barta