About this event
FilmOn November 10, 2026, the University of Toronto’s School of Cities will support the public launch of the Memories of Black Toronto Project. We will debut two short films that present powerful stories from Black Toronto in the late 19th century, recreating daily life for Black residents in vivid cinematic detail through generative AI. The project is an interdisciplinary experiment, pairing rigorous archival research with emerging filmmaking technology, to bring “hidden” chapters of the city’s Black history to life.
Led by SofC Urbanist-in-Residence Kofi Hope, hosted by Emily Mills of How She Hustles, and in partnership with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and her platform ArchiveBlack (Formerly known as Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives), a team of researchers, architects and filmmakers spent one year developing these films. The goal was to explore how to ethically use generative video AI to present stories from Black history we have limited visual record of, in a stunning recreation of Toronto’s past. Every scene was rigorously referenced to actual archival images, maps and news reports. Directed by local filmmaker Matthew Pompey with voice narration from members of the Black community, the project has asked how we can use this new technology to develop visually beautiful, historically accurate narrative stories that to-date have been too cost-prohibitive to be produced by conventional filmmaking.