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Filmmaker Biographies

Nicole Blundell , artiste et cinéaste basée à Ottawa Canada, se distingue par son engagement dans la création d’images argentiques. Son travail a été présenté dans de nombreux festivals et galeries, tant au Canada qu’à l’étranger. Elle met également un grand accent sur l’éducation à l’image, le mentorat et la transmission du savoir de pratiques argentique.

 

Pixie Cram is a filmmaker and animator who lives in Ottawa. In her films she explores themes of nature, technology and war. On top of her own art practice, she works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor.

Bridget Farr is a prolific filmmaker creating 16mm short films. Her work ranges from documentary, experimental, and commissioned films and has created a body of work of over 100 productions. Honoured by the Canadian Film Institute for her contributions as an artist, CFI director Tom McSorley refers to Farr’s diverse work as “restless cinema”. Birdiefarr.com

Matthieu Hallé is a media artist interested in finding new uses for the technology used in filmmaking. His work includes experimental film and video, and performances using custom-made projection devices. Often, his work involves hybridizing analog and digital mediums, abstraction, and the use of organic materials. He has collaborated with many different improvising musicians who have complemented the spontaneity and chance elements within his own live moving-image performance works.

It was the punk and metal scene in the Canadian prairies that kicked started Dave Johnson’s love of filming. Realizing he wasn't a good musician, he began documenting the scene, and videotaping sketches with his friends using an old video camera. After some brief travels, he enrolled in film school in Regina where he cultivated his cinematic skills while adhering to the punk DIY ethos by experimenting with film and challenging cinematic conventions. After working on various independent productions and working in a sound studio as a sound fx editor, Dave got the travel bug again. He ended up in Australia where he developed and taught an introduction to alternative cinema class and started screening Canadian shorts to large audiences. In 2004, he enrolled at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim school of cinema and earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Film Production. Since this time Dave has been involved within the arts scene in Ottawa where he was Vice president at IFCO (the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa) and later became the Technical Director. Currently, Dave’s artistic practice is based on experimenting with documentary techniques, process cinema, expanded cinema and sound design. His work has been exhibited both Nationally and Internationally and as a member of the Windows Collective. In addition, he currently teaches at Algonquin College and is a producer for SDC video.

Penny McCann's body of work spans three decades and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. In 2008 and 2010, Penny participated in the Independent Imaging Retreat, aka the Film Farm, in Mount Forest, Ontario, led by Philip Hoffman. Through these periods of study and experimentation, McCann has expanded her filmic vocabulary to include deeply resonant hand-processed imagery. Her films and videos have been widely exhibited at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including Centre national d’art contemporain (Grenoble, France), the Hamburg International Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque, New Mexico), the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), and Festival International du film sur l’art (Montreal, Quebec).

 
 
 

Christopher Rohde is a filmmaker, musician and curator from Ottawa. His work has been screened at festivals internationally and won awards for Best Film by an Emerging Filmmaker at the Jasper Short Film and Media Arts Festival and Best Director (Experimental) at the Ottawa Independent Video Awards. Christopher was a member of Available Light Screening Collective from 2006 – 2013, and Programmer at SAW Video Media Art Center from 2010 – 2015, where he curated dozens of screenings, installations, exhibitions, performances and other projects. In 2014, he founded Mirror Mountain Film Festival, a platform for celebrating unique creative voices.

Brian Virostek attended BealArt in his hometown of London, Ontario and obtained a BFA and an MFA in film production from Concordia University in Montreal. While at Concordia, he co founded the film processing non-profit La Cuve. He also carried out several film preservation projects at Visual Collections Repository, one of which grew into the video mixing performance Holiday Native Land (co-created with Nicolas Renaud, 2022).

At the Cinémathèque Québécoise, he worked on the archival processing of several fonds and participated in the project Savoirs Communs du Cinéma, an initiative that aims to make the data of cinema freely accessible and usable. Brian Virostek now works as an audiovisual archivist in the Cultural Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada. His filmography can be found here.

Cooper is an Ottawa-based media artist, their body of work includes films, HD videos, installations, and live performances. Cooper’s practice is heavily based on the technical aspects of the filmmaking process and they create their films using an array of techniques, including stop-motion, 2D & 3D animation, optical printing, film processing, and cinematography. Thematically Cooper’s films are a reflection of their memories and are drawn from life experiences. Cooper is an award-winning artist and their work has been presented at festivals and art galleries across Canada and internationally. thefilmscientist.ca