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Jennifer Abbott | |
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| Born | January 8, 1965 |
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| Years active | 1993–present |
Jennifer Abbott (born January 8, 1965) is a Sundance and Genie award-winning film director, writer, editor, producer and sound designer who specializes in social justice and environmental documentaries.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, Abbott studied political science with a particular interest in radical political thought, women's studies and deep ecology at McGill University. She attended law school briefly before she quit to go to Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she studied for a few years before deciding to teach herself what she needed to know to become a filmmaker. Years later, she would teach at that same university.
Abbott is a mother of three children, including twin daughters born in 2006 featured in her film The Magnitude of All Things. She's an early adopter of renewable energy in transport and lifestyle, an organic farmer and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism studying to take precepts in the socially engaged Zen Peacemakers Order.
Abbott splits her time between Vancouver and the Gulf Islands on Canada's West Coast where she lived for many years on a renewable energy permaculture farm. She is the sister of journalist Heather Abbott, [1] the great, great-granddaughter of the first Canadian born Prime Minister of Canada John Abbott and the great, great-grandniece of Maude Abbott, one of Canada's first women doctors who had to challenge Bishop's University's men-only policy to be permitted to attend medical school, graduating in 1894. She is the cousin of actors Christopher Plummer and Amanda Plummer and the great, great-granddaughter of R. S. Williams & Sons musical instrument makers.
In 2020, Abbott released the feature documentary The Magnitude of All Things [2] about the emotional and psychological dimensions of the climate crisis which she wrote, directed, co-produced, edited, sound designed and narrated. The film, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Cedar Island Films and Flying Eye Productions, was described by POV magazine "as poignant as it is provocative," and calls "to mind the lyrical and elegiac wonder of Terrence Malick." [3] Tammy Bannister, Vancouver International Film Festival Programmer, called it "Perhaps the most visceral reasoned call to action for humanity since An Inconvenient Truth." The Magnitude of All Things won the Best Canadian Feature Award at the Planet in Focus Film Festival and will have its international premiere in Amsterdam at the world's largest documentary film festival IDFA (film festival) featured in the Frontlight program. The Magnitude of All Things features stories from the climate frontlines of Nunatsiavut in Northern Canada, the Amazon Rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, the fires of New South Wales and among others, Greta Thunberg, Anote Tong, Patricia Gualinga and Roger Hallam.
In 2020, she also released The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (co-directed with Joel Bakan), a follow-up to their international hit The Corporation which was co-directed with Mark Achbar. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and Forbes has called it "The Must-See Documentary of the Year." [4]
Abbott first started working in media with Sara Diamond and The Women's Labour History Project. In 2004, Abbott's first experimental short and multimedia work Skinned about interracial relationships, made with writer David Odhiambo, was exhibited at NY's Museum of Modern Art.
Her first feature documentary, A Cow at My Table (1998), addresses the ongoing battle between animal advocates and the meat industry. Five years in production took Abbott across Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to meet with leading activists for the animal rights movement, as well as spokespeople from the meat industry. Filming landed her in jail in Saskatchewan after she crawled under a fence on slaughterhouse property. A Cow at My Table (1998) was one of the first feature documentaries to expose and criticize intensive animal agribusiness and won several international awards.
In 2000, Abbott collaborated with director Mark Achbar to create Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage (2000). The documentary is a low-budget video diary of the first legally married lesbian couple in Canada. The film received multiple festival invitations and was later broadcast on Canadian television networks.
Abbott continued her collaboration with Achbar in 2003 when they co-directed the critically acclaimed documentary film The Corporation (2003). The film critically explores modern day corporations through the evaluation of corporate behavior towards society and the world at large. Incorporating interviews with 40 corporate insiders and real-life case studies, Abbott hopes the film will ultimately inspire strategies for change. During the directing/editing process, Abbott went through over 800 pages of interview transcripts and 400 hours of footage. The first "rough cut" was 34 hours that she whittled down into a narrative structure, in both content and emotional arc, over the course of a year. It was important to her that the documentary did not force ideas onto the audience but rather asked questions open to interpretation. [5] During the filming of the documentary, Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. [6]
Abbott completed editing the film Let It Ride: The Craig Kelly Story a week before having twin daughters in 2006 when she took a short break from filmmaking.
Abbott became involved with the documentary I Am (2011) after director Tom Shadyac saw The Corporation and invited Abbott to work as the editor and executive producer on the film. The documentary explores Shadyac's personal journey after a 2007 bicycle accident caused him to develop post-concussion syndrome. Abbott had an immediate connection with the film's subject matter, beliefs and core philosophy. Abbott worked remotely on the film from her home in Canada. [7]
In 2013, Abbott was commissioned by the Netherlands' Submarine Chanel to create an experimental short for a multimedia compilation based on a chapter from Steven Poole's book Unspeak and created the short film Brave New Minds constructed entirely from footage ripped from the internet.
In 2015, Abbott co-wrote and edited Sea Blind [8] about the sea route opening along the northern pole due to climate change and melting ice as well as the detrimental environmental impacts of the shipping industry. She also co-wrote, co-directed and edited Us and Them which features 4 homeless people living with addictions over the course of ten years.
Unspeak: Brave New Minds(2013)
The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel(2020)
The Magnitude of All Things (2020)
Sound Design
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media is a 1992 documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of linguist, intellectual, and political activist Noam Chomsky. Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick expand the analysis of political economy and mass media presented in Manufacturing Consent, a 1988 book Chomsky wrote with Edward S. Herman.
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan and filmmaker Harold Crooks, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern corporation. Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power during the filming of the documentary.
Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, also known as Cinéfest and Cinéfest Sudbury is an annual film festival in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, held over nine days each September. It is one of the largest film festivals in Canada.
Mark Achbar is a Canadian filmmaker, best known for The Corporation (2003), Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1994), and as an Executive Producer on over a dozen feature documentaries.
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Petrov is a Russian animator and animation director.
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.
Mina Shum is an independent Canadian filmmaker. She is a writer and director of award-winning feature films, numerous shorts and has created site specific installations and theatre. Her features, Double Happiness and Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity both premiered in the US at the Sundance Film Festival and Double Happiness won the Wolfgang Staudte Prize for Best First Feature at the Berlin Film Festival and the Audience Award at Torino. She was director resident at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. She was also a member of an alternative rock band called Playdoh Republic.
A Cow at My Table is a 1998 documentary film examining Western attitudes towards farm animals and meat.
Chris Barrett is an American Internet entrepreneur, film director, spokesperson, and author who is featured in the 2004 Sundance award winning documentary The Corporation and its 2020 sequel The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel.
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.
The Atlantic International Film Festival is a major international film festival held annually in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada since 1980. AIFF is the largest Canadian film festival east of Montreal, regularly premiering the region's top films of the year, while bringing the best films of the fall festival circuit to Atlantic Canada.
Charles Officer was a Canadian film and television director, writer, actor, and professional hockey player.
Jennifer Fox is an American film producer, director, cinematographer, and writer as well as president of A Luminous Mind Film Productions. She won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her first feature documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Her 2010 documentary My Reincarnation had its premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2010, where it won a Top 20 Audience Award.
Liz Marshall is a Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. Since the 1990s, she has directed and produced independent projects and been part of film and television teams, creating broadcast, theatrical, campaign and cross-platform documentaries shot around the world. Marshall's feature length documentaries largely focus on social justice and environmental themes through strong characters. She is known for The Ghosts in Our Machine and for Water on the Table, for which she also produced impact and engagement campaigns, and attended many global events as a public speaker. Water on the Table features water rights activist, author and public figure Maude Barlow. The Ghosts in Our Machine features animal rights activist, photojournalist and author Jo-Anne McArthur.
Connie Field is an American film director known for her work in documentaries.
Marina Zenovich is an American filmmaker known for her biographical documentaries. Her films include LANCE, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which won two Emmy awards.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
The Magnitude of All Things is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Jennifer Abbott and released in 2020. The film explores the concept of environmental grief, through the lens of connecting Abbott's emotional reaction to the death of her sister Saille from cancer to her emotional reactions to climate change.
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