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 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
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 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
From 2008-2015, [1] Cizek directed the National Film Board of Canada's Highrise series on life in residential skyscrapers, including the 2010 world's first 360 degree web documentary Out My Window, winner of the inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and an International Digital Emmy for best digital program: non-fiction, [2] [3] and the 2011 webdoc One Millionth Tower, which lets users explore a highrise complex in 3D virtual space, as Toronto residents re-imagine their neighborhood. [4] [5]
A Short History of the Highrise is an interactive documentary that "explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world." The centerpiece of the project is four short films by Cizek—Mud, Concrete and Glass—with images culled from The New York Times's visual archives, that are "intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation." The fourth short film, Home, is being made with user-submitted images. The interactive site will incorporate the films and also offer additional archival materials, text and microgames. It premiered as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival Convergence program on September 30, 2013 and online at NYTimes.com in October. [6] [7] In April 2014, Cizek received a Peabody Award for A Short History of the Highrise, [8] followed by a News & Documentary Emmy Award in the fall of 2014. [9]
Cizek collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenDocLab unit to develop the final production in the Highrise project called Universe Within. As part of MIT’s Visiting Artists Program, she worked with scholars and apartment residents to ask how new technological forms are reshaping personal lives in suburban high-rise communities. [10]
Universe Within is the final iteration of NFB Highrise, directed by Cizek and co-created with Digital Agency Secret Location and Dr. Deborah Cowen and Dr. Emily Paradis. On March 8, 2016, Universe Within received the award for Best Original Interactive Production Produced for Digital Media at the 4th Canadian Screen Awards. [11] At the 2016 Webby Awards, Universe Within received the Webby for Online Film & Video/Best Use of Interactive Video. [12]
Prior to working on Highrise, Cizek directed an NFB crossmedia documentary project about life inside Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. Called Filmmaker-in-Residence, it garnered a Webby Award for Best Documentary Series. [13] [14]
Prior to joining the NFB, her films included Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News , co-directed with Peter Wintonick.
She is currently heading up a new research and production initiative at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Cizek and NFB producer Gerry Flahive collaborated on academic research with urbanist Roger Kiel on how cities are changing, with the Global Suburbanisms program at York University. [13] Cizek collaborated closely with an academic team at University of Toronto on the final iteration of HIGHRISE, on a joint book and documentary project about Digital Citizenship in the Global Suburbs. [15] Cizek is a long-time teacher at the annual ESoDoc workshops. She teaches new media approaches to documentary creation. [16]
Cizek was born in Waterloo, Ontario. The daughter of Czech immigrants, she now lives in the Roncesvalles district in Toronto. Cizek has a degree in anthropology from McGill University in Montreal and worked as an independent filmmaker before joining the National Film Board of Canada, where she worked as a filmmaker-in-residence. Her father Jiří Čížek taught quantum physics at the University of Waterloo. [16] He is known for introducing Coupled cluster theory. [17]
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.
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.
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St. Michael's Hospital is a teaching hospital and medical centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was established by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1892 with the founding goal of taking care of the sick and the poor of Toronto's inner city. The hospital provides tertiary and quaternary services in cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, inner city health, and therapeutic endoscopy. It is one of two Level 1 adult trauma centres in Greater Toronto, along with the larger Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. As trauma centres, both St. Michael's and Sunnybrook are equipped with helipads. It is one of several teaching hospitals of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and is part of the Unity Health Toronto hospital network.
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The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival is the world's largest Indigenous film and media arts festival, held annually in Toronto in the month of October. The festival focuses on the film, video, radio, and new media work of Indigenous, Aboriginal and First Peoples from around the world. The festival includes screenings, parties, panel discussions, and cultural events.
Waterlife is a 2009 documentary film and web documentary about the state of the Great Lakes. It was directed by Kevin McMahon.
Welcome to Pine Point is a 2011 interactive web documentary by Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, collectively known as The Goggles, formerly creative directors of Adbusters magazine. The website explores the memories of residents from the former mining community of Pine Point, Northwest Territories, as well as how we remember the past. The project was produced in Vancouver by the National Film Board of Canada.
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Loc Dao is a Canadian digital media creator who is the chief digital officer (CDO) of the National Film Board of Canada. Dao was named CDO in March 2016, after serving as executive producer and creative technologist for the NFB English-language digital studio in Vancouver since 2011.
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.
Rob McLaughlin is a Canadian journalist and digital media producer who is currently the executive producer of the National Film Board of Canada's Digital Studio in Vancouver. McLaughlin was announced as the head of the NFB studio in May 2016, having previously served as Director of Digital Content and Strategy at the NFB from 2008–2011.
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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.
Seven Digital Deadly Sins is a 2014 web documentary, produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and The Guardian, which explores online behaviour according to the traditional seven deadly sins. It features video confessions by such artists and celebrities as Newfoundland comedian Mary Walsh, Billy Bragg, novelist Gary Shteyngart, comic Josie Long, musician Bill Bailey and writer Jon Ronson. The interactive site also allows users to absolve or condemn various digital "sins" of the day. The site was created in collaboration with Jam3 and produced for the NFB by its Digital Studio in Vancouver, with Loc Dao as executive producer.
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.
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