The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and alternative dramas. In total, the NFB has produced over 13,000 productions since its inception, which have won over 5,000 awards. The NFB reports to the Parliament of Canada through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. It has bilingual production programs and branches in English and French, including multicultural-related documentaries.
Sook-Yin Lee is a Canadian broadcaster, musician, film director, actress and multimedia artist. She is a former MuchMusic VJ and a former radio host on CBC Radio. She has appeared in films, notably in the John Cameron Mitchell movie Shortbus.
Roman Kroitor was a Canadian filmmaker who was known as a pioneer of Cinéma vérité, as the co-founder of IMAX, and as the creator of the Sandde hand-drawn stereoscopic 3D animation system. He was also the original inspiration for The Force. His prodigious output garnered numerous awards, including two BAFTA Awards, three Cannes Film Festival awards, and two Oscar nominations.
Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American-Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.
Caroline Leaf is a Canadian-American filmmaker, animator, director, tutor and artist. She has produced numerous short animated films and her work has been recognized worldwide. She is best known as one of the pioneering filmmakers at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). She worked at the NFB from 1972 to 1991. During that time, she created the sand animation and paint-on-glass animation techniques. She also tried new hands-on techniques with 70mm IMAX film. Her work is often representational of Canadian culture and is narrative-based. Leaf now lives in London, England, and is a tutor at The National Film and Television School. She maintains a studio in London working in oils and on paper and does landscape drawing with an iPad.
Léa Pool C.M. is a Canadian and Swiss filmmaker who taught film at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has directed several documentaries and feature films, many of which have won significant awards including the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and she was the first woman to win the prize for Best Film at the Quebec Cinema Awards. Pool's films often opposed stereotypes and refused to focus on heterosexual relations, preferring individuality.
Cynthia Scott is a Canadian award-winning filmmaker who has produced, directed, written, and edited several films with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Her works have won the Oscar and Canadian Film Award. Scott is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Her projects with the NFB are mainly focused on documentary filmmaking. Some of Scott's most notable documentaries for the NFB feature dancing and the dance world including Flamenco at 5:15 (1983), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. She is married to filmmaker John N. Smith.
Through a Blue Lens is a Canadian documentary film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The film follows interactions between police officers and drug addicts and documents the extreme poverty and suffering many addicts endure.
Bonnie Sherr Klein is a feminist filmmaker, author and disability rights activist.
Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives is a 1992 Canadian hybrid drama-documentary film about Canadian lesbians navigating their sexuality while homosexuality was still criminalized. Interviews with lesbian elders are juxtaposed with a fictional story, shot in fifties melodrama style, of a small-town girl's first night with another woman. It also inserts covers of lesbian pulp fiction. The film presents the stories of lesbians whose desire for community led them on a search for the few public beer parlours or bars that would tolerate openly queer women in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. It was written and directed by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman and featured author Ann Bannon. It premiered at the 1992 Toronto Festival of Festivals and was released in the United States on 4 August 1993. It was produced by Studio D, the women's studio of the National Film Board of Canada.
Paule Baillargeon is a Canadian actress and film director. She won the Genie Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, and was a nominee for Best Director for The Sex of the Stars . Her film roles have included August 32nd on Earth , Jesus of Montreal , A Woman in Transit , Réjeanne Padovani and Days of Darkness .
Evelyn Lambart was a Canadian animator and film director with the National Film Board of Canada, known for her independent work, and for her collaborations with Norman McLaren.
Jane Marsh Beveridge was a Canadian director, producer, editor, composer, screenwriter, teacher and sculptor. She was best known as one of the pioneering filmmakers at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
John Spotton C.S.C. was a Canadian filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada.
Aerlyn Weissman is a two-time Genie Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker and political activist on behalf of the lesbian community.
Kathleen Shannon was a Canadian film director and producer. She is best known as the founder and first executive producer of Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada, the first government-funded film studio in the world dedicated to women filmmakers.
Justine Pimlott is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Maya Gallus. She began her career apprenticing as a sound recordist with Studio D, the women’s studio at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), in Montreal. As a documentary filmmaker, her work has won numerous awards, including Best Social Issue Documentary at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and Best Canadian Film at Inside Out Film and Video Festival for Laugh in the Dark, which critic Thomas Waugh described, in The Romance of Transgression in Canada as "one of the most effective and affecting elegies in Canadian queer cinema." Her films have screened internationally at Sheffield Doc/Fest, SEOUL International Women’s Film Festival, Women Make Waves (Taiwan), This Human World Film Festival (Vienna), Singapore International Film Festival, among others, and have been broadcast around the world.
Michelle Mohabeer is a Canadian filmmaker and writer. Her films have received many rewards including the Isabella Liddell Art Award and the 5 Feminist Minutes Award. Her first work, Exposure (1990) was produced through the National Film Board's Studio D. During and after creating several films, she has also served as an adjunct lecturer at the following post-secondary institutions: University of Toronto, Trent University, University of Western Ontario, Ryerson University and Sheridan College.
Sophie Bissonnette is a Canadian director, editor, writer, and producer in the Quebec film industry. After graduating from Queen's University, she began creating films in Montreal. She released most of her documentary films in the 1980s. In these films, Bissonnette illustrated social and political justices, both of which were topics that were covered commonly by many Quebecois filmmakers. However, her films were distinguishable through exploring the women's perspective of male-dominated social engagements and incidents in French Canada.
Studio D was the women's unit of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the world's first publicly funded feminist filmmaking studio. In its 22-year history, it produced 134 films and won 3 Academy Awards. Cinema Canada once called it the "Jewel in the Crown Corporation."
