Third places are an important part of any community. They provide individuals, young and old, a place to congregate outside of home and work/school, to relax with various kinds of leisure activities. For the Ontario, Canada, community, this includes Ontario Place, a 155 acres space on the waterfront that, since its opening in 1971, has been a location for attending concerts, watching movies, riding rides, and general relaxation. The government-funded space has undergone many changes over the decades; however, in 2018, moves were made to shift from a public-driven perspective to a private one, with the portion known as West Island being sold to a private spa. Using a non-narrative approach, filmmaker Ali Weinstein (#Blessed) invites global audiences to explore Ontario Place past and present as the future grows questionable. Screened during Atlanta Film Festival 2025 in the New Mavericks section, Weinstein’s Your Tomorrow spends a few months in 2023 following workers and guests of Ontario Place, offering perspectives that highlight the day-to-day use of the space, demonstrating the variety of its guests, and the ways in which revitalization may be inevitable.
The moment the focus for living became capitalist — pursuit of money and productivity always — we lost something. One shouldn’t be working in order to live, but working enough to have the life one wants. The push toward financial gain does very little to actually improve everyday lives and, more often than not, propagates the belief that private firms will service people better than local government. Perhaps this is a pipe dream, a naive belief, yet, time has proven that companies will pay fines time and again because, while punitive, if one can afford them, why make a change? Public resources, however, (though not perhaps in the current U.S. administration) are typically managed with the end user, the average citizen, in mind; therefore, any illegalities, once realized are addressed and corrected, the power of local government often being more impactful and resonant for citizens than federal. The point, if you will, is that shifting from publicly-owned space to private, even if just a portion of the land, not only reduces the available access that Ontario locals have come to expect, but it sets the tone that the 155 acres are up for sale under the correct conditions. Fascinatingly, this is a perspective that the audience comes to, not through traditional means, but by the guiding hand of Weinstein.
Like most documentaries, Your Tomorrow captures live moments of individuals as they go about their lives. Here, it means a mix of sitting in on the orientation for new Ontario Place security workers, individuals who oversee park operations, and guests who use the space. Weinstein eschews name and title cards throughout the film, elements which would help the audience to better understand who they are following and/or listening to, choosing instead to focus on how they exist within the space and how they comport themselves. This means that when we transition to an elderly couple, switching between their native tongue and English as they relax in deck chairs and discuss the future, we don’t really know who they are or their direct relationship to Ontario Place, but we do get the sense that they are regulars whose third space habits include coming here in order to casually plan upcoming trips with family. Likewise, we may only get to know the names of the security team when they come up naturally in a situation, but we come to understand the way they perceive their respective jobs whether through listening to the kids working a summer job chat or how they engage with park guests during an event. The absence of specificity gives the engagements unexpected weight because the audience starts to see guests, staff, and the sequences involving artists and sale protestors as avatars for all those who came before.
A still from documentary YOUR TOMORROW. Photo courtesy of ATLFF 2025.
This is, of course, aided by the many videos Weinstein intercuts within the documentary to show footage throughout the decades. It’s official Ontario Park event footage, some that looks donated from a home movie stash, which conveys how the space looks now versus how it once did. On the one hand, going from the cinemascope of the 1970s to the Cinesphere Theatre in the 2020s, one can acknowledge that certain improvements do a great service to the populace. One can even acknowledge that the vacant spaces on West Island, shown to us as others, unidentified (like a seeming tour guide through the space that is, also, not known to us), wander through the area, should not remain vacant; especially when Weinstein juxtaposes the present run-down visage of the space with the once vitalized third space of yesteryear. However, one can also acknowledge that public funds can only go so far and that space that isn’t being actively used (and I don’t mean where people set up picnics, go swimming, or engage in other leisure activities) does become fair game. Sadly, this means that local government is just as likely to make a space open to private development if public use cannot be conceived.
While this is, of course, a major issue and speaks to whether or not the council who made this decision did so with the public in mind or merely capital gains, the issue with Your Tomorrow is that Weinstein never presents evidence to imply one thing over another. There’s no driving force, no personal quest. The sale’s been done and, from the start, we come to understand that this is the last season for this security team before West Island is closed down. This gives the whole of the documentary not only a striking sense of inevitability, but it makes latching onto the loss of the third space more difficult in the wake of no investment in the people beyond what they must come to terms with losing. The cross-cutting or juxtaposing of archival footage does a great job of showing what Ontario Place was and the included perspective of its guests and staff does give audiences a sense of what it means to people now. However, the notion that we won’t ever get to know these people beyond what they represent generates a distance to what’s happening that makes this very local event remain locally impactful. Admittedly, it’s also odd that the security team is clearly identified as working in the 2023 season and, much later, we’re shown guests attending a screening at Cinesphere with two ticket-takers shown, at a distance to us, talking about their own experiences as kids coming here for movies when the official site of the theater states that it’s been closed since 2022. Yes, Your Tomorrow is a non-narrative, but the chronology is odd and inserts an uncertainty through everything else, intentionally or otherwise.
Growing up in the small town of Roanoke, Virginia, third spaces were common for events. As a child on July 4th, for instance, we’d walk down Yellow Mountain and sit on hills to watch fireworks blast into the sky. These hills are now apartment buildings and, Victory Stadium, the place from which the fireworks were shot, has been gone since 2006. Changes like this constantly occur as public needs change, sometimes sacrificing third spaces in the process. Whether it’s right or not is a question up to each individual, the complexities often not fully known to us from one moment to the next until we get up close and personal. To that end, Weinstein’s Your Tomorrow doesn’t so much seem to seek to convince us of whether the privatization of West Island to a spa is a good idea or not; rather, she seems to want us to look at the past and the present and make a choice for ourselves. To quote Billy Joel, “… ‘Cause the good ole days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.” That may be entirely reductive, but without a clear protagonist in the documentary, it’s far more difficult to assign an antagonist and, therefore, determine right and wrong.
Screening during Atlanta Film Festival 2025.
For more information, head to the official ATLFF 2025 Your Tomorrow webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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