GIMME SOME TRUTH 2009 GUEST BIOS
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L'ATELIER NATIONAL DU MANITOBA was a three-year art project devoted to the artistic study of Winnipeg pop culture ephemera. Known for the “Stand Tall,” “Discount Everything” and “Murder Capital” street art campaigns, the Atelier produced the blockbuster 2005 retrospective of lost Winnipeg television, Garbage Hill. Fiercely independent, provocative and stridently contemptuous of censorship, the Atelier artists were nearly forced to destroy every single copy of their underground found footage collage-doc, in 2006. Though the Atelier project was completed in 2008, the artists associated with it – including Mike Maryniuk and Matthew Rankin - continue to re-imagine Winnipeg ephemera and have presented their work around the world at the Images Festival, Sundance, Clermont-Ferrand, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, SXSW and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
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DAVE CERF is a filmmaker, musician, sound designer, and software designer. His earliest memory is when his parents replaced his crib with a mainframe computer. After graduating California Institute of the Arts, he moved to the Bay Area and began collaborating with other musicians, filmmakers, and media artists. He composed music for Scott Kennedy’s film OT: Our Town and Sam Green’s The Weather Underground, and provided a live audio performance over the films of Jennifer Reeves, Pat O’Neill, and Melinda Stone, including her 2003 California Tour of abandoned drive-in movie theatres.
For the past 30 years, PAUL COWAN has worked as director, cinematographer and writer, in both drama and documentary, and has been honoured with numerous international awards. His award winning documentaries include Westray and The Peacekeepers. His feature drama credits include Justice Denied and Double or Nothing: The Rise and Fall of Robert Campeau. Cowan is an Oscar® nominee for Going the Distance, his documentary about the Edmonton Commonwealth Games.
MARTIN DELISLE holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from Ottawa University and a Film Diploma from Algonquin College. He has been a cameraman and cinematographer, a lecturer at both Ottawa University and Algonquin College, a film reviewer for Radio-Canada in Ottawa, and Director of Programming at the Canadian Film Institute, where he organized several national traveling film festivals. From 1989 to 2005, Delisle worked at Telefilm Canada, first in their Festivals Bureau promoting Canadian films and filmmakers internationally, then becoming a Script Analyst for their Film Operations Unit. Since 2005, Delisle has worked as a freelance consultant working in diverse aspects of film, including marketing, dissemination, programming and script development.
In ten years of feature documentary and fiction filmmaking, cinematographer MARK ELLAM has brought a unique cinematic vision to reality. He has helped to create award-winning films including The Take by Avi Lewis, Empz 4 Life by Allan King - Canada’s “father of cinema verité” - and Alexandre Trudeau’s films So Close, So Far and Secure Freedom. For Big Sugar, by Brian McKenna, Mark travelled alone and undercover to the Dominican Republic, capturing footage of Haitian plantation workers suffering under conditions of slavery. Mark’s recent work as cinematographer includes Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A remix manifesto.
SYLVAIN L'ESPÉRANCE studied visual arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and then film at Concordia University. In 1992, he directed Les printemps incertains, a documentary portraying the decline of a working-class Montréal neighbourhood, a work which revealed his concerns with both social and formal issues as well as a mode of working which includes experimental elements. He explored the topic of work in Le temps qu'il fait (1997), and La main invisible (2002), shot in Guinea, where the world of artisans and the transformation of raw material are symbolically extrapolated into dance. He followed with Un fleuve humain (2006), for which he served not only as producer and director, but also director of photography.
Since 1984, PEPITA FERRARI has worked as an animator, director and producer on a wide variety of productions. Ferrari has directed and produced an animated short on dinosaurs which is featured in several films and television specials, including The Hunt for China’s Dinosaurs, on PBS. Her 2008 film Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary looks at over 30 luminaries of documentary film.
BRETT GAYLOR is a documentary filmmaker and new media director. He is the creator of opensourcecinema.org, a video remix community which supports the production of his feature documentary RiP: A remix manifesto. He is also the web producer of the Homeless Nation.org, a web project dedicated to bridging the digital divide - allowing everyone to participate in online culture. Brett is one of Canada’s first videobloggers and has been working with youth and media for over 10 years, and is a founding instructor of the Gulf Islands Film and Television School.
SAM GREEN received his Master’s Degree in Journalism from University of California Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His most recent feature length film, the Oscar® nominated documentary (co-directed with Bill Siegel), tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and 70s. Other documentaries include and the shorts, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 and the shorts lot 63, grace, Pie Fight ‘69 co-directed with Christian Bruno), N-Judah 5:30, The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson). Green currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute.
JOHN GREYSON is a Toronto film/video artist whose features, shorts and installations include Fig Trees (2009 Best Documentary Teddy, Berlin International Film Festival ), Proteus, Zero Patience and Lilies (Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles and San Francisco). An associate professor at York University, he was awarded the Toronto Arts Award for Film/Video in 2000 and the prestigious Bell Canada Video Art Award in 2007.
JUDY IRVING is a Sundance and Emmy award winning filmmaker whose credits include The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a feature documentary about the relationship between a homeless street musician and a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco, and Dark Circle, a feature documentary about the nuclear industry. Wild Parrots was a “Top Ten Film of the Year” (National Film Critics’ Poll), was the highest-rated program on the 2007 national PBS series “Independent Lens.”
SHEREEN JERRETT has filmed everything from vampire castles in Romania, to Leila’s Hair Museum in Indiana. She has made films about whales, neurotics, nerds and her family members. Working in both indies and commercial venues, she has directed and written award-winning documentaries, dramas, TV series, commercials, educational, art films, new media, and some things that just plain defy description.
Inspired by the aesthetics and melodramatic flourishes of silent cinema, Central European literature and the desolation of his native Winnipeg, GUY MADDIN has fashioned a career like no other. A Super-8-cranking modern-day Eisenstein, filming plots that would make John Waters blush, Maddin embraces cinema where expressionism, somnambulism and lurid sexual neuroses unite - and conquer!
ALANIS OBOMSAWIN, a member of the Abenaki Nation, is one Canada's most distinguished filmmakers. For over four decades, she has directed documentaries that chronicle the lives and concerns of First Nations people and explore issues of importance to all. Obomsawin began her career as a singer, writer and storyteller, but dove into filmmaking in 1967. Since then, Obomsawin has made over 20 uncompromising documentaries on issues affecting Aboriginal people in Canada. In 2008, Obomsawin was honoured with the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement and was additionally the subject of a special retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Recently, Obomsawin was honoured with an Outstanding Achievement Retrospective Award at the 2009 Hot Docs Documentary Festival.
Born in Winnipeg in 1969, MALCOLM ROGGE is a filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. His debut feature documentary film, Under Rich Earth, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and met with rave reviews. After four years studying theatre, philosophy and literature in Winnipeg, Rogge completed a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University, a Graduate Diploma in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and a Bachelor of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He melds his passion for art and politics using diverse approaches in film and video.