Program Dates:
April 6 - July 2, 2026 (three months)

Submission Period:
APPLICATIONS CLOSED

2026 marks the 30th year of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival!
Many years of festival programming mean that we’ve created an eclectic material and digital footprint, archives that document the festival’s engagement with successive waves of socio-political and socio-cultural issues. With this in mind, we’re hosting two residents for a three-month residency program to expand our festival’s capacity to activate the past, inhabit the present and imagine the future.


Could this be you?
This residency is ideal for artists, research-creation practitioners, and/or community archivists looking to work with the festival’s material and audio-visual archives for three months. But we welcome applications from folks with all kinds of backgrounds.

Residents can focus on a project inquiry with either an artistic or archival focus (or a combination of the two) to explore themes and engage questions around festival history, films from Asia or the Asian diaspora, or consider potentialities (and limits) of evolving discourse on and political practices of Asian representation, solidarities and arts programming. If you have an idea that may resonate but fall outside of this scope, we are open to unique pitches!

Questions that informed our conceptualization of this residency:

• How might we re-map and critically activate Reel Asian’s film programming history? 
• How has the festival spoken of and presented itself over time?
  
• What could the festival archive do for community vision and history?
  
• What have been the strengths and contributions of the festival?
  
• What have been the weaknesses or limitations of the festival?
  
• How can we both celebrate and trouble the festival’s relationships in community, the film industry and the city’s arts ecosystem?
  

These questions are only a starting point and do not inform the total scope of this open-ended program. 

There is no mandatory final deliverable for this residency. Instead, residents will be asked to work on-site at least twice a week for the three months in our office and research centre, and offer biweekly W-I-P dispatches to be featured through our newsletter and social media These can take the forms of multimedia formats of short essays, audiovisual work, digital art or other forms to activate archive materials, draft work, or iterative research process.
In addition, residents are welcome to get involved in our Community Archive project running concurrently alongside the residency. 


Archival Materials Available:

• Marketing materials
  
• Recordings of past events
  
• All programme guides
  
• Old festival trailers
  
• Festival paraphernalia and merch
  
• Copies of commissioned work
  
• Archive of select short films
• Press Clippings
  
• Material paraphernalia
• Boxes of archive materials in research centre (unsorted)
  
• Small library of RA texts and texts from other organizations / festivals
  

Submission Guidelines
Eligibility: 

• Canada-based
• Able to work onsite at our 401 Richmond office twice a week for all three months
• Identifies as part of the Asian diaspora
  

Application Requirements:

• Project Proposal (250 words)
• Description of Artistic Practice or Archival Experience (250 words)
  
• Archival Materials you plan to engage (200 words)
  
• Space or Tech Requirements (100 words)
  
• Photo Documentation of Past Work: up to 5 photos (Optional)
  
• Textual Documentation of Past Work: up to 5 pgs (Optional)
  
• CV
  
• Days and times of week you are planning to work onsite 

Residents will receive:

• a $3,000CAD honorarium
• a festival pass to the 30th Reel Asian Film Festival
• a complimentary copy of our 25th anniversary anthology, (re)Rites of Passage

Email your application as a PDF to specialprojects@reelasian.com

Accessibility:
Alternatively, you may answer these questions via video or audio and attach a link to a downloadable file.

This program is co-run by Reel Asian programmers Jasmine Gui and Khanh Tudo.