Director
When 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya burst onto the world stage in 2009, her championship was not celebrated, but marred by doubt, and her personal medical records leaked to international media. With some women's naturally high androgen levels deemed a performance advantage, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) ruled that in order to compete, these female athletes must medically alter their healthy bodies. Category: Woman focuses on four athletes from the Global South who are forced out of competition by these regulations. The public scrutiny and policing of their bodies raises issues of racism, sexism and denial of their fundamental human right—who they are. Following up on her award-winning film Toxic Beauty, Phyllis Ellis exposes an industry controlled by men who put women's lives at risk, while this ongoing policing of women's bodies in sport remains, in a more nefarious way, under the guise of fair play.
Screenplay
From Earth to Sky explores the work of seven unique and accomplished Indigenous Architects as they design and complete extraordinary 'buildings' in cities and communities across North America and Turtle Island. Beautiful and intimate, the film sparks a vital conversation paramount to transforming perspectives on how we approach our built environment.
Producer
Fleeing religious persecution, resilient Jewish immigrants arrive in Toronto and begin building affordable, quality housing in a growing metropolis.
Writer
Fleeing religious persecution, resilient Jewish immigrants arrive in Toronto and begin building affordable, quality housing in a growing metropolis.
Director
Beauty products are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Despite public attention, companies continue to get away with harmful practices that leave the average consumer wondering which brand can be trusted. Toxic Beauty's case in point is the landmark class action lawsuit brought by female cancer survivors against Johnson & Johnson, in the face of the company's insistence that their baby talc products are safe.
Director
Director Phyllis Ellis's television program argues that pop culture and alcohol company marketing have created a binge drinking problem for some young women.
Ethel
A once accomplished sculptor, a former college art teacher, but now a lonely graveyard shift doorman, Abner Roth is sadly a mere shadow of his former self. Having lost the love of his life and haunted by the death of a woman in a terrible car accident a year ago, he is desolate and suicidal but amusingly so. Step in Zoe, a free spirited taxi driver with a large hart and persuasive disposition. Zoe's energy and outlook help Abner look at life anew and try to reconcile his conflicted past.
Producer
A lawyer returns to her Cree reservation to defend her sister against murder charges.
Rita Danchuk
It's the winter of 1935 and Max Brown is newly arrived in Willowgreen, Saskatchewan - a rural Canadian prairie town - on his first teaching job in a one room schoolhouse. He quickly realizes that this is not a dream situation: the winter is harsher than he's ever experienced, he's living in the basement of the school, the older of his students treat him poorly and his wages are paltry if and when he ever does get paid.
