• The Producers Internship - Call for Applications due November 1, 2006
• Alliance Atlantis Communications Diversity in Broadcasting Internship - Call for Applications due October 25, 2006
• CBC Canadian Reflections Award - Call for Applications due October 4, 2006
• Kodak New Vision Fellowship - Call for Applications due Tuesday August 1, 2006
• WIFT-T Banff Mentorship Award - Call for Applications due Thursday, May 18, 2006

2006 Kodak New Vision Fellowship

Presented by Women in Film and Television - Toronto
In partnership with Kodak Canada Entertainment Imaging

2006 Kodak New Vision Fellowship Winner: Rosamund Owen

Women in Film and Television – Toronto (WIFT-T), in partnership with Kodak Canada Entertainment Imaging, is pleased to announce the winner of the 2006 Kodak New Vision Fellowship: Rosamund Owen. Owen will be honing her creative and business skills in the upcoming months with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Mansfield Park) and senior executive Laurie May, Co-President of Maple Pictures Corp.

For the press release, click here.

Rosamund Owen's credits include her first award-winning short film A Precaution Against the Inevitable; the half-hour dramatic film A Love of Contradiction, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; and the Genie-nominated short film You Love Me I Hate You, which had its world premiere at The Locarno International Festival in Switzerland and its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her television directing credits include JETT JACKSON, Ready or Not and Real Kids Real Adventures. Most recently, Owen directed Journey to Freedom, a one-hour fundraising documentary for Interval House, the first women's shelter in Canada. She is slated to direct Open & Shut in spring 2007. In 2008, she will direct Look Both Ways, a $5 million co-production with the U.K.

MENTORS

Born in 1958 in Kingston, Ont., Patricia Rozema (pronounced Rose’-ehm-a) saw almost no films and very little television in the Dutch Calvinist community in which she was raised. While completing her honour’s B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rozema decided, however, to become a journalist and write fiction on the side. She worked at NBC television news stations in Chicago and New York, and as an associate producer at CBC’s The Journal in Toronto, but she soon realized her powerful attraction to the world of fiction.

Right from the start of her narrative filmmaking career, Rozema quickly began to establish the thematic and stylistic terrain that would later come to define the rest of her work. Her films are elegant fairy-tale like stories inhabited by outsider protagonists, typically struggling artists, set on paths toward enlightenment. Throughout her body of work she maintains a poetic consciousness and has established herself as a remarkably sensual visual stylist. (more...)

Laurie May is Co-President of Maple Pictures Corp., the Canadian distribution operation spun off by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. in April 2005. Laurie received her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Toronto Law School, practiced corporate and entertainment law at Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt, and was an adjunct professor of Entertainment and Sports Law at the University of Western, Faculty of Law. She joined Lions Gate Films Corp. (formerly Cinepix Film Properties) as Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs in March 1997, and was promoted to Senior Vice President, Business & Legal Affairs for Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, the publicly traded company. In this capacity she oversaw legal matters involving production and distribution, and was involved in such notable films as The Red Violin, Affliction, Gods and Monsters, Monster's Ball, Godsend, The Snow Walker and Farenheit 911 and notable television productions including Dead Zone and Missing. In addition, her corporate responsibilities included the 2000 acquisition of Trimark Pictures, the 2003 acquisition of Artisan Entertainment, and related banking and financings. Since joining Maple she has been involved in successful releases including the Academy Award winning Crash. She currently sits on the board of Lions Gate Entertainment.

The Kodak New Vision Fellowship is presented annually to one emerging Canadian female filmmaker. The award offers the invaluable opportunity to prepare for the Toronto International Film Festival through intensive industry coaching and a post-festival creative mentorship.

The Kodak New Vision Fellowship winner receives the following benefits:

• $3,000 in-kind donation of Kodak Motion Picture film stock
• Preparation for the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival with a seasoned industry
professional
• Oone-on-one, two-month post-TIFF mentorship with an established director
• Complimentary TIFF registration and access to professional seminars and training at the
Festival
• Announcement of Fellowship Winner at the WIFT-T Festival Reception in September 2006
• $1,200 Programming Pass to use for any professional development programming presented by WIFT-T's [centre for media professionals]
• Award presentation at the Crystal Awards Gala Luncheon on December 4, 2006
• Guidance for post-TIFF follow up

Patricia Rozema (cont.)
After working as third assistant director on David Cronenberg’s The Fly, she began submitting her own proposals to art councils.

Her first short film Passion: A Letter in 16 mm (1985) is an intriguing and intimate 28-minute filmic love letter to an unidentified lover, establishing her keen interest in the subject of the artist figure. The composer of said “letter” is a documentary filmmaker, Anne Vogel, played by Linda Griffiths. The film explores Anne's struggle to come to terms with a failed romantic relationship, as she recounts her attempts to balance her work life and personal life. The film won the Silver Plaque at the Chicago Film Festival and was written up as a “tour de force” when it was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It would be Rozema's first feature-length film, however, that would propel her into cinema's international limelight. I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) is undoubtedly one of Canada's most celebrated and circulated success stories. A serious comedy about a socially inept temporal-secretary, the film stars Sheila McCarthy in a standout performance as Polly Vandersma. Told as a confession via video camera, Polly narrates the tale of her fascination with the “Church Gallery’s” worldly curator Gabrielle St. Peres (Paule Baillargeon) and her girlfriend – a maker of magically glowing paintings – Mary Joseph (played by novelist Ann Marie MacDonald). Mermaids explores the demands of being an artist and the necessity of a split subject--a public/private split.

The film’s title is drawn from T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to
each/I do not think that they will sing to me.

The film would go on to win the coveted Prix de la Jeuness at Cannes in 1987, where it received a now legendary six-minute standing ovation. It won multiple Genies (Canada’s top film award) dozens of awards around the world and was voted one of the Top Ten Canadian films of all time.

Rozema's ambitious follow-up film, White Room (1990) seems equally inspired by Emily Dickinson's poetry as by Hitchcock's Psycho and Rear Window. It is a dark, contemporary tale of an ineffectual voyeur, Norman Gentle, who witnesses the brutal rape and murder of the famous singer Madeline X (Margot Kidder). He encounters two other artists: Jane (Kate Nelligan) a mysterious woman who is revealed to be the voice behind Madeline X and Zelda (Sheila McCarthy), an attention-hungry environmental artist. Rozema skillfully subverts expectations of a resolved ending by culminating the film with a double ending, one distressing and the other magical.

Next, Patricia Rozema participated in the collective film project Montreal vu par ... (1991), for which she made a clever and stylistically playful short, Desperanto, exploring our sometimes perplexing bilingualism. Unable to conquer the linguistic/cultural divide, the character escapes into a fantasy world where anything is possible, including stepping outside of the film to read the subtitles and being rescued by characters from Denys Arcand’s Le Declin de l’Empire Americain.

Rozema's next film, though by no means mainstream, did have decidedly more mainstream ambitions. The rhapsodic lesbian love story, When Night Is Falling (1995) was strategically created as a crossover film that would appeal to a broader audience. Placing a contemporary spin on the Cupid and Psyche myth, Rozema casts a lesbian couple within the cozy and familiar generic conventions of the classic romance. A Christian college professor, Camille (Pascale Bussieres) is engaged to a would-be chaplin (Henry Czerny) when she meets Petra (Rachael Crawford), a lesbian performance artist with an avant-garde circus.

When Night Is Falling was invited to the competition in the Berlin Film Festival and won audience awards there, at the Women’s Film Festival, and at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Six Gestures (1997), part of the Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach television series, continues Rozema's exploration of artistry and self-expression. An interpretation of Bach's music as performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Rozema's voracious quest for context and knowledge results in an essayistic film that elucidates Bach as an artist.

Using direct address with Bach, played by Tom McCamus, speaking to the audience, she constructs a filmic essay; footnotes and all. Combining dramatic enactments, with documentary style interviews,Yo-Yo Ma's cello performance, the figure skating of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, and graffiti messages, Rozema creates a truly polyphonic structure. Six Gestures was awarded a Prime Time Emmy and the Golden Rose at the Montreux Film Festival, it is among Rozema's finest work, a true expression of her style and vision.

Rozema's following two films would mark an exit from Canadian production. It is no surprise that when approached by Miramax to take on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, a novel many considered impossible to transfer to the screen, Rozema chose to incorporate Austen's letters and early journals, and turn Fanny Price into Jane Austen herself, a clever and irreverent writer. She cast Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter as well as Frances O’Connor, Jonny Lee Miller, Alessandro Nivola, & Embeth Davitz. Convinced that the historical context of the novel was critical to its understanding, Rozema brought out the fact of slavery that is implicit but subtle in the novel. The result is a sophisticated revisionist adaptation of Austen’s novel, and Rozema’s most confident film to date.

In 2000, Rozema directed Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, a bleakly comic play filmed on the top of a volcano on one of the Canary Islands. Filmed for the Irish-produced Beckett Film Project, which invited noted filmmakers from around the world (Anthony Minghella, Neil Jordan, David Mamet, etc.).

Also in 2000, in honour of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, 10 preeminent Canadian filmmakers were asked to create short films. Staying true to her thematic preoccupation with artists, audiences and their relationship, Rozema's contribution was This Might Be Good, a six-minute wordless, experimental B&W piece about hope—the hope of the audiences, actors and filmmakers who gather around films at festivals.

In addition to writing and directing all of her projects, Patricia Rozema has produced and edited several of them, as well as executive produced an adaptation of Jim Carroll’s Curtis’s Charm (1996) directed by John L'Ecuyer and a television adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time (2003) again for Miramax and ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney.

After 20 years of filmmaking, Patricia Rozema has an impressive collection of considered, intelligent feasts for the eyes. She has reinvented the iconic paralyzed artist figure that has preoccupied the Canadian and international cultural imagination and constructed strong, complex, successful artist characters. Creating compelling stories that question modes of storytelling themselves, Rozema continually explores her craft and her terrain.

Rozema is developing a feature and currently shooting a new HBO series called
Tell Me You Love Me.

 

For further information regarding the Kodak New Vision Fellowship, please contact:

WIFT-T
Tel: 416.322.3430 x222
Fax: 416.322.3703
Email: wift@wift.com

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