Heather Croall | |
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Born | 1967 (age 56–57) |
Nationality | Australian and British [1] |
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Heather Ann Croall AM (born 1967) is an international arts festival CEO and artistic director and documentary producer, best known for leading Sheffield Doc/Fest and Adelaide Fringe, and her work on live music / archive films including The Big Melt, From the Sea to the Land Beyond, Girt By Sea, From Scotland With Love, Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise
In 2024 Heather Croall AM was awarded an Order of Australia for her services to the arts and film. In 2022 Heather Croall won the Festival Management CEO of the Year 2022 (Australia) as voted by CEO Monthly magazine. Heather Croall won the Leadership Award at the 2020 SA Woman Awards and in 2021, Croall was nominated as Leader of the Year in the South Australian Woman of the Year Awards. In 2011 Croall was named one of Realscreen's annual trailblazers, and in 2013 the Alliance of Women Film Journalists named Croall Ambassador of Women's Films for the year, for her work "to boost documentary film and open opportunities for women filmmakers". In 2015 she received Sheffield Doc/Fest's Inspiration Award. In 2021 Croall was awarded the Superhero Award at the DocEdge Festival in New Zealand. In 2023, Croall was listed in Top 10 Most Admired Women Leaders. [2]
In February 2015 she left Sheffield Doc/Fest to take up the position of CEO and artistic director of the Adelaide Fringe, with her contract there extended until 2026.
Croall was born in Blackpool in 1967 and lived in Sheffield until the age of five, when her family emigrated to South Australia. [3]
In 1993, Croall set up a production company, Re Angle Pictures, to produce and direct documentaries. In 2020 she Produced and Directed a documentary about her dad and her home town of Whyalla called “Yer Old Faither” it won the audience award at Adelaide Film Festival and was selected for Glasgow Film Festival and others. Her 1999 film Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa won the Silver Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival. [4] She continued her career at the South Australian Film Corporation, and also produced digital and documentary strands at the Adelaide Fringe. [4] In 2001, she developed Crossover, an organisation which works with technologists, coders, artists, performers, filmmakers, writers and more to create new interdisciplinary projects.
From 2003, Croall worked for the Australian International Documentary Conference, where she became CEO and Festival Director and developed the MeetMarket pitching event. [1] Croall then set up the MeetMarket at Sheffield Docfest in 2006 and it is still a central part of that festival.
In 2006, Croall was invited to become CEO and festival director at Sheffield Doc/Fest. [5] When she joined the festival, it was a two-day event attracting 500 delegates and 2000 public attendees. Croall widened it to a five-day event with 3000 delegates and 25,000 public attendees. [6] She found new funding which tripled the budget in two years, [7] and changed the date of the festival from November to June. She brought in the MeetMarket pitching forum, which in 2011 generated £5.6 million worth of business for producers. [8] She also added year-round training and events alongside the festival. [3]
Variety magazine said Croall lifted Doc/Fest "into the premier league of international doc events". [9] In 2012 Croall sat on the US Documentary jury at the Sundance Film Festival, [10] and she was on the 25th anniversary advisory committee for PBS's POV documentary series. [1] In 2015 she was awarded Sheffield Doc/Fest's Inspiration Award.
In February 2015, Croall left Doc/Fest to become CEO and festival director of the Adelaide Fringe, with her contract extended to 2020 after two successful festivals. [11] [12] [13] Her contract was extended again to 2024.
In August 2016, under Croall's leadership, the Adelaide Fringe began an official partnership with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. [14]
Croall has co-produced a number of films, in which directors edit together archive footage on a particular theme, soundtracked by original music.[ citation needed ]
Heather Croall won the Festival Management CEO of the Year 2022 (Australia) as voted by CEO Monthly magazine.
In 2020 Heather Croall won the Leadership Award at the SA Woman Awards and in 2021, Croall was nominated as Leader of the Year in the South Australian Woman of the Year Awards.
In 2015 Croall received Sheffield Doc/Fest's Inspiration Award. [24] In 2021 Croall was awarded the Superhero Award at the DocEdge Festival in New Zealand.
In 2014 Croall was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University.
The Alliance of Women Film Journalists named Croall 2013's Ambassador of Women's Films for her work "to boost documentary film and open opportunities for women filmmakers", [25] and in 2011 Croall was named a trailblazer by Realscreen. [26]
Croall was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2024 Australia Day Honours for "significant service to the performing arts, as an administrator, advocate and film maker". [27]
She has appeared on BBC Two's The Review Show [28] and BBC Radio 4's The Media Show . [29]
Adelaide Fringe, formerly Adelaide Fringe Festival, is Australia’s biggest arts festival and is the world's second-largest annual arts festival, held in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. Between mid-February and mid-March each year, it features more than 7,000 artists from around Australia and the world. Over 1,300 events are staged in hundreds of venues, which include work in a huge variety of performing and visual art forms. The Fringe features many free events occur alongside ticketed events for the duration of the festival.
Peter Kenneth Wintonick was a Canadian independent documentary filmmaker based in Montreal. A winner of the 2006 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, former Thinker in Residence for the Premier of South Australia, prolific award-winning filmmaker, he was one of Canada's best known international documentarians.
The Adelaide Film Festival is a film festival usually held for two weeks in mid-October in cinemas in Adelaide, South Australia. Originally presented biennially in March from 2003, since 2013 AFF has been held in October. Subject to funding, the festival has staged full or briefer events in alternating years; some form of event has taken place every year since 2015. From 2022 it takes place annually. It has a strong focus on local South Australian and Australian produced content, with the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF) established to fund investment in Australian films.
Sheffield DocFest, is an international documentary festival and Industry Marketplace held annually in Sheffield, England.
Ondi Doane Timoner is an American filmmaker and the founder and chief executive officer of Interloper Films, a production company located in Pasadena, California.
The Interrupters is a 2011 documentary film, produced by Kartemquin Films, that tells the story of three violence interrupters who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once employed. It examines a year in which Chicago drew national headlines for violence and murder that plagued the city.
Welcome to Pine Point is a 2011 interactive web documentary by Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, collectively known as The Goggles, formerly creative directors of Adbusters magazine. The website explores the memories of residents from the former mining community of Pine Point, Northwest Territories, as well as how we remember the past. The project was produced in Vancouver by the National Film Board of Canada.
Highrise is a multi-year, multimedia documentary project about life in residential highrises, directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The project, which began in 2009, includes five web documentaries—The Thousandth Tower, Out My Window, One Millionth Tower, A Short History of the Highrise and Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise—as well as more than 20 derivative projects such as public art exhibits and live performances.
The Big Melt is a documentary film about the Sheffield steel industry which combines archive footage with a live soundtrack. It was produced by Heather Croall and Mark Atkin and Martin Rosenbaum and directed by Jarvis Cocker and Martin Wallace for the 20th annual Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2013, to celebrate the centenary of the steel industry. The film was made using footage from the BFI National Archive. The film was commissioned by BBC Storyville and BBC North in association with the BFI, using public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
From The Sea to the Land Beyond: Britain's Coast on Film is a documentary feature film directed by Penny Woolcock, with an original soundtrack by British indie-rock band Sea Power. The project was produced by Heather Croall and Mark Atkin of Crossover to premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest as part of The Space project from the BBC and the Arts Council England. The film was edited by Alex Fry.
Lindsey Dryden is a British film director, producer and writer.
Charlie Phillips is the head of documentary acquisition and production and The Guardian, and a former deputy director of Sheffield Doc/Fest in the United Kingdom.
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a 2014 American biographical documentary film about Aaron Swartz written, directed, and produced by Brian Knappenberger. The film premiered in the US Documentary Competition program category at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014.
Mark Atkin is a British filmmaker and director at Crossover Labs. He has directed and produced films, including co-producing The Big Melt and From the Sea to the Land Beyond, and organized film festival events.
Maya Gallus is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Justine Pimlott. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, SEOUL International Women’s Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, This Human World Film Festival (Vienna) and Women Make Waves (Taiwan), among others. Her work has also screened at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Donostia Kultura, San Sebastián and Canada House UK, as well as theatrically in Tokyo, San Francisco, Key West and Toronto, and been broadcast around the world. She has won numerous awards, including a Gemini Award for Best Direction for Girl Inside, and has been featured in The Guardian, UK; Ms. (Magazine), Curve (Magazine), Bust (Magazine), Salon (Magazine), POV and The Walrus, among others. She is a Director/Writer alumna of the Canadian Film Centre and a participant in Women in the Director’s Chair. She will be honoured with a "Focus On" retrospective at the 2017 Hot Docs festival.
Girt by Sea is a documentary film about the Australian coast which combines archive and crowd-sourced footage with an original soundtrack by The Panics.
Stephen Edward Hewlett was a British print, radio and TV journalist, and visiting professor of Journalism and Broadcast Policy at the University of Salford.
Sophie Hyde is an Australian film director, writer, and producer based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is co-founder of Closer Productions and known for her award-winning debut fiction film, 52 Tuesdays (2013) and the comedy drama Animals (2019). She has also made several documentaries, including Life in Movement (2011), a documentary about dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke, and television series, such as The Hunting (2019). Her latest film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2022. Her upcoming film Jimpa stars Olivia Colman and John Lithgow.
Anthony William James Baxter is a British documentary director and producer. He is known for his documentary films Eye of the Storm, Flint: Who Can You Trust?, You've Been Trumped and A Dangerous Game.
Nira Burstein is an American filmmaker based in New York City. She is known for her documentary film Charm Circle. In 2021, Filmmaker magazine named her one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film".
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