The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and alternative dramas. In total, the NFB has produced over 13,000 productions since its inception, which have won over 5,000 awards. The NFB reports to the Parliament of Canada through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. It has bilingual production programs and branches in English and French, including multicultural-related documentaries.
Guy Maddin is a Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, and film editor of both features and short films, as well as an installation artist, from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since completing his first film in 1985, Maddin has become one of Canada's most well-known and celebrated filmmakers.
Cowards Bend the Knee is a 2003 film by Guy Maddin. Maddin directed Cowards Bend the Knee while in pre-production on The Saddest Music in the World, shooting entirely on Super-8mm film with a budget of $30,000.
Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a 1988 film directed by Guy Maddin. His feature film debut, it was his second film after the short The Dead Father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in black and white on 16 mm film and stars Kyle McCulloch as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar for the attention of the young nurses.
Buffalo Gal Pictures is an independent TV and film production company based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives is a 1992 Canadian hybrid drama-documentary film about Canadian lesbians navigating their sexuality while homosexuality was still criminalized. Interviews with lesbian elders are juxtaposed with a fictional story, shot in fifties melodrama style, of a small-town girl's first night with another woman. It also inserts covers of lesbian pulp fiction. The film presents the stories of lesbians whose desire for community led them on a search for the few public beer parlours or bars that would tolerate openly queer women in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. It was written and directed by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman and featured author Ann Bannon. It premiered at the 1992 Toronto Festival of Festivals and was released in the United States on 4 August 1993. It was produced by Studio D, the women's studio of the National Film Board of Canada.
Night Mayor is a 2009 short film by Guy Maddin, about a fictional inventor in Winnipeg who uses the Aurora Borealis to broadcast images of Canada from coast to coast in 1939, until the Canadian government shuts down his illegal project.
Katerina Cizek is a Canadian documentary director and a pioneer in digital documentaries. She is the Artistic Director, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.
BLA BLA is an interactive animated film for computer created for by Vincent Morisset with Montreal studio AATOAA, and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The online work has been described as exploring "the principles of human communication," and follows Morisset's collaborations with Arcade Fire on Neon Bible, considered the first interactive music video.
Louis Negin was a British-born Canadian actor, best known for his roles in the films of Guy Maddin. He is a cousin of Mark Louis Negin
Bear 71 is a 20-minute 2012 interactive National Film Board of Canada (NFB) web documentary by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes about a female grizzly bear in Banff National Park named Bear 71, who had a tracking collar implanted at the age of three and was watched via trail cameras in the park from 2001 to 2009. The documentary follows the bear, exploring the connections between the human and animal world, and the far-ranging effects that human settlements, roads and railways have on wildlife.
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.
David Christensen is an Alberta film director and producer who since October 2007 has been an executive producer with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) at its Northwest Centre, based in Edmonton.
The Forbidden Room is a 2015 Canadian experimental fantasy drama film co-directed by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, and written by Maddin, Johnson, and Robert Kotyk. The film stars Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, Udo Kier, Gregory Hlady, Sparks, Karine Vanasse, Adele Haenel, Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros and Geraldine Chaplin.
The 40th annual Toronto International Film Festival was held from 10 to 20 September 2015. On 28 July 2015 the first wave of films to be screened at the Festival was announced. Jean-Marc Vallée's Demolition starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts was the opening night film; Mr. Right by Paco Cabezas was the closing night film.
Way to Go is a 2015 Canada/France interactive film and virtual reality web-based experience created by the Montreal digital studio AATOAA and produced by National Film Board of Canada and France Télévisions. The production lets users take a virtual walk in the woods, through a combination of animation and immersive video.
The Green Fog is an experimental film directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, that loosely revisits the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo through a collage of found footage repurposed from old movies and television shows set in San Francisco. The film was commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival’s and premiered at the festival's close on April 16, 2017. It then entered limited release on January 5, 2018 and began to tour international festivals.The film features an original score by composer Jacob Garchik and Kronos Quartet.
Galen Johnson is a Canadian filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, most noted for his frequent collaborations with Guy Maddin. He was a Canadian Screen Award nominee for Best Art Direction/Production Design at the 4th Canadian Screen Awards in 2016 for his work on Maddin's The Forbidden Room.
Evan Johnson is a Canadian filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, most noted for his frequent collaborations with Guy Maddin. He was codirector of Maddin's The Forbidden Room, which was the winner of the Toronto Film Critics Association's Rogers Best Canadian Film Award at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2015.
