Tell Me Everything

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

BRIAN D. JOHNSON – producer/director/cinematographer/editor

ANDREA NANN – dancer/choreographer

JOHN GZOWSKI – composer/musician

LOUISE GARFIELD – executive producer

RON MANN – executive producer

NICK DE PENCIER – creative consultant, lighting

Directed by Brian D. Johnson

Tell Me Everything is a seven-minute film of hands in motion. A dance by Andrea Nann is intercut with documentary shots of hands at work—ranging from massage therapists to bread makers, from chef Jamie Kennedy on the cutting board to dancer Peggy Baker on the barre. A poetic narrative suggests a conduit of courtship, argument, sex and procreation. Framed by aquatic images, the film becomes a fluid assembly line of unconscious intent. There is no dialogue, only music. An original score by John Gzowski features contributions from Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas.

After working for 20 years as a film critic, I had no ambition to become a filmmaker. It was an accident. In the summer of 2003. while in a log cabin on a remote lake in Quebec, I started toying with the 19-second video function on a 2-megapixel point-and-shoot camera. I had iMac in the cabin, and learned to edit on iMovie. Soon I had a brisk schedule of shooting, cutting, scoring and titling one-a-day home videos. The staccato frame rate and ragged resolution made them look like instant artifacts, images of people long dead. I was hooked, one more recruit to the desktop revolution in digital technology.

Next I began borrowing and renting camcorders. I liked to shoot urban landscapes, and score them with melancholy music by Philip Glass. I wanted to shoot people, but wasn’t ready for faces. During a session of massage therapy, I thought of making a landscape film about hands at work. Without a “project” in mind, I started shooting professional hands. I shot bakers, pastry chefs, tobacco rollers, costume cutters and massage therapists. I worked alone, by trial and error, dragging lights into Ace Bakery, wondering how best to illuminate fingers stabbing focaccia dough.

For any one who asked, I told them this was a “hobby.” Of course thousands of amateurs were doing similar things around the world, and their work would erupt onto vast websites like youtube.

At one point, filmmaker Ron Mann (Grass), intrigued by the DIY movement in cinema, expressed curiosity in the notion of a film critic stumbling into filmmaking. I showed him my footage. “You could get money for this,” he said. Fatal words. He urged me to seek funding, and so I made a foray into the professional world of filmmaking, where I would learn it was possible to get money without actually making money. Ron acted as a mentor throughout. But while he helped me start the film, Louise Garfield, who became another executive producer, helped me finish it. A veteran of both movie production (The Hanging Garden) and performing arts (the Clichettes), Louise nurtured the project every step of the way. While navigating the shoals of contracts and budgets, she also brought a trained eye to every cut—and there were many.

I never imagined it was possible to spend almost two years making a seven-minute film. Some of the hands footage dates back to 2004, but the project officially began in May, 2005, when I received a grant from Bravo!FACT. The program’s director, Judy Gladstone, suggested I incorporate a dancer into the mix. I didn’t know much about dance. But I’d just seen Andrea Nann perform a mesmerizing piece she had created with Michael Ondaatje for Veronica Tennant’s Shadow Pleasures. I met Andrea and told her that I didn’t want to make a dance film that captured a work of choreography intact. And I wasn’t looking for established ritual hand-dance vocabulary. Instead, I wanted her to improvise and choreograph gestural movements that could be sliced into the documentary footage so the film would develop a choreography of its own.

Although the piece now involved documentary and performance, it felt important that Andrea’s performance be captured in documentary fashion—on location, not on a set. We spend four afternoons in a rehearsal studio. I shot the rehearsals. Then we filmed the final sequences at the YMCA pool at night, framed against water and glass brick. For that, I had a minimal crew. Nick de Pencier, who had directed many dance films of his own, took the guesswork out of lighting.

Dance films tend to have the music established in advance. We played various kinds of music while shooting. But we recorded no location sound. The score was composed and recorded after the picture was locked.

The immensely talented John Gzowski, who had worked with Andrea before, seemed a logical choice for composer. I told him to treat the film as the score and the score as the film: they should carry equal weight. I also asked for “live” music, not machine music to a click track. So John recorded a series of live rhythm tracks, improvising on guitar with a drummer, Jean Martin, whose used steel chains and vibrating eggs on his drums skins as well as sticks and brushes. John went on to create a rich score, recording himself playing piano, guitar, keyboards, cello, dumbek, oud and percussion.

Leonard Cohen, who had seen some of my amateur video work, offered to play some Jew’s harp—he has a full collection of Jew’s harps. Leonard recorded an overdub in a Los Angeles studio. His partner, singer Anjani Thomas, contributed an ethereal vocal, which arrived as a sweet surprise—something I’d had been looking for without knowing it. Meanwhile, in the same log cabin in Quebec where it all started, I recorded my own overdub with djembe and some sparse percussion, which John gracefully integrated into his score without complaint. I’d set out to make a handmade film about hands. In the end, through a trail of serendipity, many hands went into shaping it. I’ve always seen the hands in the film as characters on a kind of assembly line, creatures engaged in the secret manufacture of an accidental narrative. No matter how I tried to direct them, at a certain point they took the film into their own hands.

- Brian D. Johnson, Sept. 2006

Brian D. Johnson is best known as entertainment writer and film critic for Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly newsmagazine. He is also an author, musician—and now a filmmaker. After several years of working on amateur videos, he has directed and produced his first professional film, Tell Me Everything, a seven-minute short produced with funding from Bravo!FACT. And with its premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, Johnson brings a long relationship with TIFF full circle. He worked for the festival in 1979 and 1980—behind the wheel of a van delivering films to theatres—and has been covering the festival as a journalist for two decades.

Born in England and raised in Toronto, Johnson received a B.A. in English at the University of Toronto, where took a year off to serve as Editor of The Varsity, the campus newspaper. In 1971 he spent a summer writing for the Toronto Telegram, just before its demise. Moving to Montreal, he worked as a staff reporter at The Gazette in Montreal (l971-74). He went on to become a freelance broadcaster and producer with CBC Radio (1975-76). Returning to Toronto in 1976, Johnson wrote a weekly column for The Globe and Mail called “Hanging Out” (under the byline B. Derek Johnson). He then left journalism for several years to devote his career to music.

As a percussionist with a series of rock and reggae bands, notably Limbo Springs and the Nukes, he recorded and toured in Canada and the United States. In 1980 he composed and recorded soundtracks for two feature-length documentary films, Strip Tease and The Dream Never Dies. Highlights of his performing career include a Toronto concert at the Horseshoe Tavern in which he played percussion in a band backing up the I-Threes, Bob Marley’s female harmony trio.

Since resuming his journalism career as a magazine writer in 1982, Johnson wrote features for magazines including Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Flare and Rolling Stone. He has won three National Magazine Awards—for politics, travel and arts & entertainment. A writer with Maclean’s since 1985, he has been the magazine’s film critic since 1986. He is also a frequent guest on radio and television, and co-hosted CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts for three seasons.

Johnson is the author of three non-fiction books: Railway Country: Across Canada by Train (1985), the XV Olympic Winter Games: The Official Commemorative Book (1988) and a history of the Toronto International Film Festival titled Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever (2000). In 1994, he published a critically acclaimed novel, Volcano Days. And his book of poetry, Marzipan Lies (1974), was the first work published by the Porcupine’s Quill.

Meanwhile, Johnson continues to work periodically as a musician. As part of the popular Classic Albums Live series, he performed at Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre in shows that faithfully reproduced the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. He also performs with his own band, Baltic Avenue.

Johnson retains the “D” to his byline, which was added in the late 1970s to avoid confusion with a former Globe and Mail namesake who, at last report, was managing a teenage brothel called Brown Sugar in the Philippines.

Andrea Nann is a Toronto-based contemporary dance choreographer, performer, teacher and artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company. Following her graduation from York University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1988, she became a full-time member of the Danny Grossman Dance Company (DGDC) where she created, performed and taught major roles from the works of Mr. Grossman and guest choreographers, until 2003.

As an independent choreographer, director and producer Nann has collaborated with author/poet Michael Ondaatje, poet/musician Gordon Downie (The Tragically Hip), composer/cellist/vocalist Anne Bourne, visual artists Wayne Ngan, Michael Caines and Janet Morton, pianist Andrew Burashko, composer John Gzowski, erhu master/composer George Gao, designers Aisling Sampson, Cheryl Lalonde, Peter Chin, Arun Srinivasan, Glenn Davidson, musical group The Skydiggers, musicians Andrew Cash, Peter Elkas, pianist Andrew Burashko, poet Chris Chambers, video artist Samm Higgison, filmmakers Peter Mettler, Nick De Pencier, Lisa Hayes, Nicole Mion and Veronica Tennant and dance/literature choreographer Sarah Chase.

Nann's dances have been presented across Canada—in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Moncton, Hornby Island, Montréal, Gibsons, St. John’s, Burnaby, Sudbury, Courtenay, Guelph, Hamilton, Ottawa, St. Catharine’s, Nepean and Toronto. In 2003, Veronica Tennant O.C. created Shadow Pleasures, an award-winning film that features two dances, Cato and Alice and Meditation #5 – On Loss and Desire, that Ms. Nann created with Michael Ondaatje.

John Gzowski is a Toronto-based composer, musician, co-artistic director of the Music Gallery and an occasional instrument builder. He has written concert music for Hemisphere's, Array Music, Evergreen Club Gamelan Ensemble and the Madawaska String Quartet. In theatre he has worked on over 50 plays, and been nominated for eight Dora Mavor Moore Awards, winning four of them. For dance he has written for Dancemakers, Kaeja D'dance, Andrea Nann, Kate Alton, for the dance film work of Veronica Tennant and Margie Gillis and over a dozen works with partner Julia Aplin.

As a musician he has played with Meryn Cadell and Merill Nisker (now known as Peaches), John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and won the 2003 Freddy Stone Award for his work as an improviser, with tours throughout North America and Europe. His interest in music from other cultures has lead him to performing on instruments such as oud, tambouritsa, cumbuc, cello, and mandolin, garnering him a Juno nomination. An interest in tuning and temperament led to his work with the microtonal group Critical Band, with concerts across North America, and building replicas of Harry Partch’s instruments. Recently he has begun studying Indian Classical music with North Indian legend, Ali Akbar Khan and Carnatic master U. Shrinivas.

Louise Garfield is a veteran of Toronto’s cultural scene. She has worked in film, television, theatre and dance as a producer, writer, performer and choreographer—notably as a founding member of the brilliant feminist lip-sync trio The Clichettes. Garfield was one of the three founding partners at Triptych Media, a Toronto based film and TV production company. She began her film career as associate producer on director John Greyson’s award-winning The Making of Monsters, and co-produced Greyson’s first feature, Zero Patience, a Musical About AIDS. In 1997 she co-produced Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden, which won prizes for most popular film and best Canadian film at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival and the Atlantic Film Festival. It also won the 1998 International Critic’s Award and four Genies. Garfield produced Lucky Girl, a television movie for CTV, directed by John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps), which won two Geminis and the Writer’s Guild of Canada’s Top Ten Award. Lucky Girl was nominated for best TV movie at the 2002 Banff International Television Festival. Now executive director of Arts Etobicoke, Garfield sits on the board of Dance Collection Danse.

Ron Mann is one of Canada’s leading filmmakers, with a 25-year career of consistently finding a theatrical audience for documentary features. His movies, which tend to celebrate and analyze movements of alternative culture, have become pop culture milestones in their own right. They include Imagine the Sound (1998), Poetry in Motion (1982), Comic Book Confidential (1983), Twist (1991), Dream Tower (1994), Grass (1999) and Go Further (2003). Mann’s work, which plays around the world, has been recognized through many awards and festival retrospectives. He has won Genies twice for Best Documentary Feature, first for Comic Book Confidential and then Go Further. His most recent work, Tales of the Rat Fink, about artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, is showing at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. Mann, who directs and produces, created his own production company, Sphinx Productions, in 1979. In 2003, with Gary Topp, he launched filmswelike, a Canadian distribution company that is filling the gap in finding an audience for independent films.

Tell Me Everything

Directed by Brian D. Johnson

Tell Me Everything is a seven-minute film of hands in motion. A dance by Andrea Nann is intercut with documentary shots of hands at work—ranging from massage therapists to bread makers, from chef Jamie Kennedy on the cutting board to dancer Peggy Baker on the barre. A poetic narrative suggests a conduit of courtship, argument, sex and procreation. Framed by aquatic images, the film becomes a fluid assembly line of unconscious intent. There is no dialogue, only music. An original score by John Gzowski features contributions from Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

After working for 20 years as a film critic, I had no ambition to become a filmmaker. It was an accident. In the summer of 2003. while in a log cabin on a remote lake in Quebec, I started toying with the 19-second video function on a 2-megapixel point-and-shoot camera. I had iMac in the cabin, and learned to edit on iMovie. Soon I had a brisk schedule of shooting, cutting, scoring and titling one-a-day home videos. The staccato frame rate and ragged resolution made them look like instant artifacts, images of people long dead. I was hooked, one more recruit to the desktop revolution in digital technology.

Next I began borrowing and renting camcorders. I liked to shoot urban landscapes, and score them with melancholy music by Philip Glass. I wanted to shoot people, but wasn’t ready for faces. During a session of massage therapy, I thought of making a landscape film about hands at work. Without a “project” in mind, I started shooting professional hands. I shot bakers, pastry chefs, tobacco rollers, costume cutters and massage therapists. I worked alone, by trial and error, dragging lights into Ace Bakery, wondering how best to illuminate fingers stabbing focaccia dough.

For any one who asked, I told them this was a “hobby.” Of course thousands of amateurs were doing similar things around the world, and their work would erupt onto vast websites like youtube.

At one point, filmmaker Ron Mann (Grass), intrigued by the DIY movement in cinema, expressed curiosity in the notion of a film critic stumbling into filmmaking. I showed him my footage. “You could get money for this,” he said. Fatal words. He urged me to seek funding, and so I made a foray into the professional world of filmmaking, where I would learn it was possible to get money without actually making money. Ron acted as a mentor throughout. But while he helped me start the film, Louise Garfield, who became another executive producer, helped me finish it. A veteran of both movie production (The Hanging Garden) and performing arts (the Clichettes), Louise nurtured the project every step of the way. While navigating the shoals of contracts and budgets, she also brought a trained eye to every cut—and there were many.

I never imagined it was possible to spend almost two years making a seven-minute film. Some of the hands footage dates back to 2004, but the project officially began in May, 2005, when I received a grant from Bravo!FACT. The program’s director, Judy Gladstone, suggested I incorporate a dancer into the mix. I didn’t know much about dance. But I’d just seen Andrea Nann perform a mesmerizing piece she had created with Michael Ondaatje for Veronica Tennant’s Shadow Pleasures. I met Andrea and told her that I didn’t want to make a dance film that captured a work of choreography intact. And I wasn’t looking for established ritual hand-dance vocabulary. Instead, I wanted her to improvise and choreograph gestural movements that could be sliced into the documentary footage so the film would develop a choreography of its own.

Although the piece now involved documentary and performance, it felt important that Andrea’s performance be captured in documentary fashion—on location, not on a set. We spend four afternoons in a rehearsal studio. I shot the rehearsals. Then we filmed the final sequences at the YMCA pool at night, framed against water and glass brick. For that, I had a minimal crew. Nick de Pencier, who had directed many dance films of his own, took the guesswork out of lighting.

Dance films tend to have the music established in advance. We played various kinds of music while shooting. But we recorded no location sound. The score was composed and recorded after the picture was locked.

The immensely talented John Gzowski, who had worked with Andrea before, seemed a logical choice for composer. I told him to treat the film as the score and the score as the film: they should carry equal weight. I also asked for “live” music, not machine music to a click track. So John recorded a series of live rhythm tracks, improvising on guitar with a drummer, Jean Martin, whose used steel chains and vibrating eggs on his drums skins as well as sticks and brushes. John went on to create a rich score, recording himself playing piano, guitar, keyboards, cello, dumbek, oud and percussion.

Leonard Cohen, who had seen some of my amateur video work, offered to play some Jew’s harp—he has a full collection of Jew’s harps. Leonard recorded an overdub in a Los Angeles studio. His partner, singer Anjani Thomas, contributed an ethereal vocal, which arrived as a sweet surprise—something I’d had been looking for without knowing it. Meanwhile, in the same log cabin in Quebec where it all started, I recorded my own overdub with djembe and some sparse percussion, which John gracefully integrated into his score without complaint. I’d set out to make a handmade film about hands. In the end, through a trail of serendipity, many hands went into shaping it. I’ve always seen the hands in the film as characters on a kind of assembly line, creatures engaged in the secret manufacture of an accidental narrative. No matter how I tried to direct them, at a certain point they took the film into their own hands.

- Brian D. Johnson, Sept. 2006

BRIAN D. JOHNSON – producer/director/cinematographer/editor

Brian D. Johnson is best known as entertainment writer and film critic for Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly newsmagazine. He is also an author, musician—and now a filmmaker. After several years of working on amateur videos, he has directed and produced his first professional film, Tell Me Everything, a seven-minute short produced with funding from Bravo!FACT. And with its premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, Johnson brings a long relationship with TIFF full circle. He worked for the festival in 1979 and 1980—behind the wheel of a van delivering films to theatres—and has been covering the festival as a journalist for two decades.

Born in England and raised in Toronto, Johnson received a B.A. in English at the University of Toronto, where took a year off to serve as Editor of The Varsity, the campus newspaper. In 1971 he spent a summer writing for the Toronto Telegram, just before its demise. Moving to Montreal, he worked as a staff reporter at The Gazette in Montreal (l971-74). He went on to become a freelance broadcaster and producer with CBC Radio (1975-76). Returning to Toronto in 1976, Johnson wrote a weekly column for The Globe and Mail called “Hanging Out” (under the byline B. Derek Johnson). He then left journalism for several years to devote his career to music.

As a percussionist with a series of rock and reggae bands, notably Limbo Springs and the Nukes, he recorded and toured in Canada and the United States. In 1980 he composed and recorded soundtracks for two feature-length documentary films, Strip Tease and The Dream Never Dies. Highlights of his performing career include a Toronto concert at the Horseshoe Tavern in which he played percussion in a band backing up the I-Threes, Bob Marley’s female harmony trio.

Since resuming his journalism career as a magazine writer in 1982, Johnson wrote features for magazines including Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Flare and Rolling Stone. He has won three National Magazine Awards—for politics, travel and arts & entertainment. A writer with Maclean’s since 1985, he has been the magazine’s film critic since 1986. He is also a frequent guest on radio and television, and co-hosted CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts for three seasons.

Johnson is the author of three non-fiction books: Railway Country: Across Canada by Train (1985), the XV Olympic Winter Games: The Official Commemorative Book (1988) and a history of the Toronto International Film Festival titled Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever (2000). In 1994, he published a critically acclaimed novel, Volcano Days. And his book of poetry, Marzipan Lies (1974), was the first work published by the Porcupine’s Quill.

Meanwhile, Johnson continues to work periodically as a musician. As part of the popular Classic Albums Live series, he performed at Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre in shows that faithfully reproduced the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. He also performs with his own band, Baltic Avenue.

Johnson retains the “D” to his byline, which was added in the late 1970s to avoid confusion with a former Globe and Mail namesake who, at last report, was managing a teenage brothel called Brown Sugar in the Philippines.

ANDREA NANN – dancer/choreographer

Andrea Nann is a Toronto-based contemporary dance choreographer, performer, teacher and artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company. Following her graduation from York University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1988, she became a full-time member of the Danny Grossman Dance Company (DGDC) where she created, performed and taught major roles from the works of Mr. Grossman and guest choreographers, until 2003.

As an independent choreographer, director and producer Nann has collaborated with author/poet Michael Ondaatje, poet/musician Gordon Downie (The Tragically Hip), composer/cellist/vocalist Anne Bourne, visual artists Wayne Ngan, Michael Caines and Janet Morton, pianist Andrew Burashko, composer John Gzowski, erhu master/composer George Gao, designers Aisling Sampson, Cheryl Lalonde, Peter Chin, Arun Srinivasan, Glenn Davidson, musical group The Skydiggers, musicians Andrew Cash, Peter Elkas, pianist Andrew Burashko, poet Chris Chambers, video artist Samm Higgison, filmmakers Peter Mettler, Nick De Pencier, Lisa Hayes, Nicole Mion and Veronica Tennant and dance/literature choreographer Sarah Chase.

Nann's dances have been presented across Canada—in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Moncton, Hornby Island, Montréal, Gibsons, St. John’s, Burnaby, Sudbury, Courtenay, Guelph, Hamilton, Ottawa, St. Catharine’s, Nepean and Toronto. In 2003, Veronica Tennant O.C. created Shadow Pleasures, an award-winning film that features two dances, Cato and Alice and Meditation #5 – On Loss and Desire, that Ms. Nann created with Michael Ondaatje.

JOHN GZOWSKI – composer/musician

John Gzowski is a Toronto-based composer, musician, co-artistic director of the Music Gallery and an occasional instrument builder. He has written concert music for Hemisphere's, Array Music, Evergreen Club Gamelan Ensemble and the Madawaska String Quartet. In theatre he has worked on over 50 plays, and been nominated for eight Dora Mavor Moore Awards, winning four of them. For dance he has written for Dancemakers, Kaeja D'dance, Andrea Nann, Kate Alton, for the dance film work of Veronica Tennant and Margie Gillis and over a dozen works with partner Julia Aplin.

As a musician he has played with Meryn Cadell and Merill Nisker (now known as Peaches), John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and won the 2003 Freddy Stone Award for his work as an improviser, with tours throughout North America and Europe. His interest in music from other cultures has lead him to performing on instruments such as oud, tambouritsa, cumbuc, cello, and mandolin, garnering him a Juno nomination. An interest in tuning and temperament led to his work with the microtonal group Critical Band, with concerts across North America, and building replicas of Harry Partch’s instruments. Recently he has begun studying Indian Classical music with North Indian legend, Ali Akbar Khan and Carnatic master U. Shrinivas.

LOUISE GARFIELD – executive producer

Louise Garfield is a veteran of Toronto’s cultural scene. She has worked in film, television, theatre and dance as a producer, writer, performer and choreographer—notably as a founding member of the brilliant feminist lip-sync trio The Clichettes. Garfield was one of the three founding partners at Triptych Media, a Toronto based film and TV production company. She began her film career as associate producer on director John Greyson’s award-winning The Making of Monsters, and co-produced Greyson’s first feature, Zero Patience, a Musical About AIDS. In 1997 she co-produced Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden, which won prizes for most popular film and best Canadian film at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival and the Atlantic Film Festival. It also won the 1998 International Critic’s Award and four Genies. Garfield produced Lucky Girl, a television movie for CTV, directed by John Fawcett (Ginger Snaps), which won two Geminis and the Writer’s Guild of Canada’s Top Ten Award. Lucky Girl was nominated for best TV movie at the 2002 Banff International Television Festival. Now executive director of Arts Etobicoke, Garfield sits on the board of Dance Collection Danse.

RON MANN – executive producer

Ron Mann is one of Canada’s leading filmmakers, with a 25-year career of consistently finding a theatrical audience for documentary features. His movies, which tend to celebrate and analyze movements of alternative culture, have become pop culture milestones in their own right. They include Imagine the Sound (1998), Poetry in Motion (1982), Comic Book Confidential (1983), Twist (1991), Dream Tower (1994), Grass (1999) and Go Further (2003). Mann’s work, which plays around the world, has been recognized through many awards and festival retrospectives. He has won Genies twice for Best Documentary Feature, first for Comic Book Confidential and then Go Further. His most recent work, Tales of the Rat Fink, about artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, is showing at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. Mann, who directs and produces, created his own production company, Sphinx Productions, in 1979. In 2003, with Gary Topp, he launched filmswelike, a Canadian distribution company that is filling the gap in finding an audience for independent films.

NICK DE PENCIER – creative consultant, lighting

Nick de Pencier is an award-winning director, producer and cinematographer working in performing arts, documentary and dramatic film. He produced and photographed three award-winning feature documentaries with director Jennifer Baichwal: Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles , which won the International Emmy for best documentary in 1999; The Holier It Gets, which won two Geminis and a prize at Hot Docs 2000, and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia, which won a Gemini for best arts documentary in 2003. He produced Uncles, a dramatic feature cited by TIFF as one of 2000’s top ten Canadian films. He also directed, produced and photographed eight acclaimed modern dance films, notably the Gemini-winning Streetcar (2004). Most recently, de Pencier produced Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, programmed as a special presentation at TIFF 2006.

Still from Blue by Elif Isikozlu.

© Moving Pictures Festival 2006
info@movingpicturesfestival.com

Nick de Pencier is an award-winning director, producer and cinematographer working in performing arts, documentary and dramatic film. He produced and photographed three award-winning feature documentaries with director Jennifer Baichwal: Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles , which won the International Emmy for best documentary in 1999; The Holier It Gets, which won two Geminis and a prize at Hot Docs 2000, and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia, which won a Gemini for best arts documentary in 2003. He produced Uncles, a dramatic feature cited by TIFF as one of 2000’s top ten Canadian films. He also directed, produced and photographed eight acclaimed modern dance films, notably the Gemini-winning Streetcar (2004). Most recently, de Pencier produced Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, programmed as a special presentation at TIFF 2006.