Mia Donovan | |
---|---|
Nationality | Canadian |
Occupation(s) | Photographer and filmmaker |
Notable work | Inside Lara Roxx |
Mia Donovan is a Canadian photographer and filmmaker. She is best known for her documentary Inside Lara Roxx released through EyeSteelFilm about 21-year-old Canadian Lara Roxx who in the spring of 2004, left her hometown Montreal heading to Los Angeles for working in pornography and within two months contracted HIV after shooting an unprotected sex scene with two males. [1] Donovan followed Lara Roxx through 5 years of Roxx's attempt to build a new identity and find hope in the wake of her past. [2] [3] Her film won "Best Documentary on Society and Humanity" at the 2011 Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival [4] and it was runner-up for "Best Feature at 2012 Boston Underground Film Festival. [5]
In 2012, she was named the winner of the Don Haig Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. [6]
Donovan received a B.F.A in Art History and Studio Arts from Concordia University in 2001.
Her photographic series 'Stripped' was shown in Montreal in January 2005. The series was an artistic reflection of commodification in the sex industry. She was picked as one of the "Noize Makers 2001" by Montreal arts weekly Montreal Mirror .
As of December 2012, [7] she was in production of her second documentary about deprogrammer Ted Patrick with EyeSteelFilm. [8] [ citation needed ]
Lara Roxx is a Canadian former pornographic actress who, in March 2004, became the first of three known individuals in four years to contract HIV while making a U.S. pornographic video.
Darren James is an American former pornographic actor and director. He gained notoriety after he contracted HIV and infected three pornographic actresses in 2004.
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.
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.
Gerry Rogers is a Canadian documentary filmmaker and politician. She was leader of the Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party from 2018 until 2019. She served in the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly as NDP MHA for the electoral district of St. John’s Centre from 2011 to 2019. She became the party's leader after winning the April 2018 leadership election. She resigned as party leader prior to the 2019 provincial election and did not seek re-election.
Daniel Cross a Canadian documentary filmmaker, producer and activist whose films deal with social justice.
EyeSteelFilm is a Montreal-based Canadian cinema production company co-founded by Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin, dedicated to socially engaged cinema, bringing social and political change through cinematic expression. Today the studio is run by co-presidents Mila Aung-Thwin and Bob Moore.
Mila Aung-Thwin is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, producer and activist whose films deal with social justice.
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.
Laura Bari is an Argentinian born and Montréal based filmmaker. She studied pedagogy at Université du Québec à Montréal, specializing in psychopathology of the expression.
Ric Esther Bienstock is a Canadian documentary filmmaker best known for her investigative documentaries. She was born in Montreal, Quebec and studied at Vanier College and McGill University. She has produced and directed an eclectic array of films from investigative social issue documentaries like Sex Slaves, an investigation into the trafficking of women from former Soviet Bloc Countries into the global sex trade and Ebola: Inside an Outbreak which took viewers to ground zero of the Ebola outbreak in Zaire - to lighter fare such as Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour.
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 males. It was revealed that one of the two males, 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.
Tony Asimakopoulos is a Canadian film and television director based in Montreal. He often collaborates with the Montreal-based Canadian film production company EyeSteelFilm. He is best known for his autobiographical documentary Fortunate Son, about his relationship with his immigrant parents, which was one of the highest-grossing theatrical documentaries in Quebec in 2012.
Stories We Tell is a 2012 Canadian documentary film written and directed by Sarah Polley and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The film explores her family's secrets—including one intimately related to Polley's own identity. Stories We Tell premiered August 29, 2012 at the 69th Venice International Film Festival, then played at the 39th Telluride Film Festival and the 37th Toronto International Film Festival. In 2015, it was added to the Toronto International Film Festival's list of the top 10 Canadian films of all time, at number 10. It was also named the 70th greatest film since 2000 in a 2016 critics' poll by BBC.
Ryan Mullins is a Canadian film director, cinematographer and editor. He is part of the Montreal-based Canadian film production company, EyeSteelFilm. His directing credits include the documentary short Volta, and the feature documentary The Frog Princes. The film won a Golden Sheaf at the 2012 Yorkton Film Festival, and was also awarded the NFB Kathleen Shannon Award for a documentary film that "allows people outside the dominant culture to speak for themselves". At the 2015 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, Mullins won the Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award for Chameleon.
Erin Lee Carr is an American documentary filmmaker. She is also an author for publications including VICE and her memoir called All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir, a story about love, addiction, and the relationship between father and daughter. In 2015, Variety included Carr as one of its "10 Documakers To Watch". Carr made the 2018 Forbes 30 under 30 list.
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.
Bobbi Jo Hart is an American-Canadian documentary filmmaker based in Montreal, Quebec. Hart was born in California and raised in Cottage Grove, Oregon. She is most noted for her films Rebels on Pointe, which won the award for Best Canadian Feature at the Inside Out Film and Video Festival in 2017 and received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Biography or Arts Documentary Program or Series at the 7th Canadian Screen Awards in 2019, and Fanny: The Right to Rock, which won the Rogers Audience Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the award for Best Canadian Film at Inside Out in 2021.
Kalina Bertin is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, most noted for her 2017 film Manic.
The Don Haig Award is an annual award, presented by the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival for distinguished achievement by a Canadian independent documentary film producer with a film in that year's festival program. Despite the requirement to have a film in that year's festival lineup, however, the award is not presented for that specific film, but in consideration of the recipient's overall body of work.