Laurie Lynd (born May 19, 1959, in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian film and television director and screenwriter, best known as the director of the feature film Breakfast with Scot . [1]
In his early career, Lynd made the short films Together and Apart (1986) and RSVP (1991), the latter of which was cited by film critic B. Ruby Rich in her influential 1992 essay on the emergence of New Queer Cinema. [2] He then attended the Canadian Film Centre, [3] making the short film The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore (1992) [4] and the feature film House (1995) [5] while studying at that institution; he was also credited as the producer of John Greyson's CFC project The Making of Monsters .
After his graduation from the CFC, he concentrated primarily on television directing, [3] including the television films Sibs and Open Heart, and episodes of Degrassi , Queer as Folk , I Was a Rat , Noah's Arc and Ghostly Encounters .
Breakfast with Scot, his second feature film, was released in 2007. His subsequent television work has included Forensic Factor , Baxter , Murdoch Mysteries , Good Witch , Schitt's Creek and The Adventures of Napkin Man .
In 2010 he released the short film Verona, which recast Romeo and Juliet as a romance between two gay university athletes from rival fraternities. [6]
In 2019 he released the documentary film Killing Patient Zero . [7]
Zero Patience is a 1993 Canadian musical film written and directed by John Greyson. The film examines and refutes the urban legend of the alleged introduction of HIV to North America by a single individual, Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, better known as Patient Zero, was the target of blame in the popular imagination in the 1980s in large measure because of Randy Shilts's American television film docudrama, And the Band Played On (1987), a history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Zero Patience tells its story against the backdrop of a romance between a time-displaced Sir Richard Francis Burton and the ghost of "Zero".
Todd Haynes is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles.
"New queer cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
John Greyson is a Canadian director, writer, video artist, producer, and political activist, whose work frequently deals with queer characters and themes. He was part of a loosely affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar; critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term "New Queer Cinema". She is currently the editor of Film Quarterly, a scholarly film journal published by University of California Press.
Mark Kenneth Woods is a Canadian writer, actor, producer, director and TV host.
Mark Christopher is a screenwriter and director most known for directing 54 (1998).
Breakfast with Scot is a 2007 Canadian comedy film. It is adapted from the 1999 novel by Tufts University professor Michael Downing.
Were the World Mine is a 2008 romantic musical fantasy film directed by Tom Gustafson, written by Gustafson and Cory James Krueckeberg, and starring Tanner Cohen, Wendy Robie, Judy McLane, Zelda Williams, Jill Larson, Ricky Goldman, Nathaniel David Becker, Christian Stolte, and David Darlow.
The Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival (formerly the Fairy Tales International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival) is an annual event held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Since its founding in 1999, the festival has attracted over 35,000 attendees. It is currently the longest running LGBT film festival in Alberta.
The Canadian Film Centre (CFC) is a charitable organization founded in 1988 by filmmaker Norman Jewison in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Originally launched as a film school, today it provides training, development and advancement opportunities for professionals in the Canadian film, television and digital media industries, including directors, producers, screenwriters, actors and musicians.
Omar Majeed is a Pakistani Canadian film director and producer who studied cinema at York University Film School and later on studied editing at the International Academy of Design in Toronto. He is the son of Pakistani actress and singer Musarrat Nazir. He went on to work as producer Toronto's Citytv and won a Gemini Award for his television work. He also worked with Canada's National Film Board through the Reel Diversity program in Montreal and with EyeSteelFilm.
Greta Schiller is an American film director and producer, best known for the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community and the 1995 documentary Paris Was a Woman.
Jeffrey St. Jules is a Canadian film director and screenwriter, who won the Claude Jutra Award in 2015 for his debut feature film Bang Bang Baby. The film also won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore is a Canadian musical comedy-drama short film directed by Laurie Lynd, which premiered at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival before going into wider release in 1993. Made as an academic project while Lynd was studying at the Canadian Film Centre, it won the Genie Award for Best Live Action Short Drama at the 14th Genie Awards.
RSVP is a Canadian short film, directed by Laurie Lynd and released in 1991. It was one of the films singled out by film critic B. Ruby Rich in her influential 1992 essay on the emergence of New Queer Cinema.
Janis Cole is a Canadian filmmaker, producer, writer, editor and professor. She has directed several films over the span of her career. Most of these films were done in cooperation with her friend and professional partner, Holly Dale. Her most notable films include Cream Soda (1976) and Prison For Women (1981).
Sean Reycraft is a Canadian screenwriter, television producer and playwright. He is most noted for his theatrical play Pop Song, which won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in the Youth Theatre division in 2001, and as the screenwriter of Laurie Lynd's 2007 film Breakfast with Scot.
Killing Patient Zero is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Laurie Lynd and released in 2019. The film is a portrait of Gaëtan Dugas, the Canadian man who was one of the earliest diagnosed HIV/AIDS patients in North America, but became incorrectly demonized as "patient zero" for the epidemic after his role in the early story of the disease was used to illustrate contact tracing in Randy Shilts's 1987 book And the Band Played On.