Laurie Townshend | |
---|---|
Occupation | Film director |
Years active | 2010s–present |
Notable work | A Mother Apart |
Laurie Townshend is a Canadian filmmaker, whose feature documentary debut A Mother Apart was released in 2024. [1]
Townshend began her career as a middle school drama teacher at Sir Ernest MacMillan Senior Public School in Toronto, Ontario, [2] where her students included Shamier Anderson and Stephan James. In 2013, she released the short drama film The Railpath Hero, and subsequently directed an episode of the 2016 documentary web series The Akua Benjamin Legacy Project.
A Mother Apart premiered at the 2024 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. [1] It subsequently screened at the 2024 Inside Out Film and Video Festival, where it won the juried awards for Best Canadian Film and Best First Feature Film, and the audience award for Best Documentary Film. [3]
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.
The Inside Out Film and Video Festival, also known as the Inside Out LGBT or LGBTQ Film Festival, is an annual Canadian film festival, which presents a program of LGBT-related film. The festival is staged in both Toronto and Ottawa. Founded in 1991, the festival is now the largest of its kind in Canada. Deadline dubbed it "Canada’s foremost LGBTQ film festival."
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.
Maureen Judge is a Canadian Screen Awards (CSA) winning filmmaker and television producer. Much of her work is documentary and explores themes of love, betrayal and acceptance in the context of the modern family, with the most recent films focusing on the dreams and challenges of contemporary youth.
Nettie Wild is a Canadian filmmaker with a focus on documentaries that highlight marginalized groups and discrimination that these groups face, including people in Canada and around the world. She has worked throughout her professional career as an actor, director, producer, and cameraperson.
Inside Lara Roxx is a 2011 EyeSteelFilm Canadian documentary film by Canadian film director Mia Donovan. It covers the circumstances of a 21-year-old Canadian woman Lara Roxx who in the Spring of 2004, left her hometown Montreal heading to Los Angeles to work in pornography. Within two months she contracted HIV after shooting an unprotected sex scene with two men. It was revealed that one of the two men, porn actor Darren James, was HIV positive. The film did well critically. In 2012, it was nominated for a Claude Jutra Award for Best Documentary.
Nisha Pahuja is an Indian-born Canadian filmmaker, based in Toronto, Ontario.
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.
Fractured Land is a 2015 Canadian feature documentary film directed by Fiona Rayher and Damien Gillis, profiling the Dené activist Caleb Behn as he goes through law school and builds a movement around greater awareness of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on First Nations lands.
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril is an Inuk filmmaker, known for her work on Inuit life and culture. She is the owner of Unikkaat Studios, a production company in Iqaluit, which produces Inuktitut films. She was awarded the Canadian Meritorious Service Cross, in 2017 in recognition of her work as an activist and filmmaker. She currently works part-time at the Qanak Collective, a social project which supports Inuit empowerment initiatives.
Larry Weinstein is a Canadian film director of theatrical and television documentaries, performance films, and dramas. The majority of his films centre on musical subjects and the depiction of the creative process, while his other subjects range from the horrors of war to the pleasures of football.
Tasha Hubbard is a Canadian First Nations/Cree filmmaker and educator based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Hubbard's credits include three National Film Board of Canada documentaries exploring Indigenous rights in Canada: Two Worlds Colliding, a 2004 Canada Award-winning short film about the Saskatoon freezing deaths, Birth of a Family, a 2017 feature-length documentary about four siblings separated during Canada's Sixties Scoop, and nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, a 2019 Hot Docs and DOXA Documentary award-winning documentary which examines the death of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the man who shot him.
nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Tasha Hubbard and released in 2019. The film centres on the 2016 death of Colten Boushie, and depicts his family's struggle to attain justice after the controversial acquittal of Boushie's killer. Narrated by Hubbard, the film also includes a number of animated segments which contextualize the broader history of indigenous peoples of Canada.
Sing Me a Lullaby is a Canadian short documentary film, directed by Tiffany Hsiung and released in 2020. The film documents Hsiung's efforts to locate and reconnect with her mother's birth family in Taiwan, following her mother's separation from her parents and adoption in childhood.
Ngardy Conteh George is a Sierra Leonean-Canadian film director, editor and producer.
Inside Hana's Suitcase is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Larry Weinstein and released in 2009. Adapted in part from Karen Levine's book Hana's Suitcase, the film centres on the story of Hana Brady, a young Czechoslovak Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust, including the reminiscences of George Brady, her sole surviving brother who emigrated to Canada following the war.
Alison Duke is a Canadian film director, producer, and writer. She is the co-founder and director of Oya Media.
Geographies of Solitude is a Canadian documentary film by Jacquelyn Mills that was released in 2022. The film is guided by Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who lives on Nova Scotia's Sable Island, where she catalogues the island's wild Sable Island horses, and endeavours to preserve its unique ecosystem.
To Kill a Tiger is a 2022 Hindi-language Canadian documentary film, directed by Nisha Pahuja. The film centres on a family in Jharkhand, India, who are campaigning for justice after their teenage daughter was brutally raped.
A Mother Apart is a 2024 Canadian documentary film, directed by Laurie Townshend. The film profiles writer and activist Staceyann Chin, both in the context of her status as a daughter who was abandoned at a young age by her mother, and as a mother who has resolved to be more caring and attentive with her daughter than her own mother was with her.