Wednesday May 28 | 3:00 pm | Vancity Theatre

An informal seminar with filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal

Free admission

A liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed—a situation which can lead to new perspectives. Liminality is the state that Jennifer Baichwal describes herself as living in during the documentary filmmaking process—without a script, open to where the story could lead.

Join Baichwal as she discusses some of the problems and situations she has been met with during the making of her five films. In this seminar, she will show clips from her documentaries and engage in a discussion with the audience.

Biography

Jennifer Baichwal has been making documentaries for fourteen years. Her first film, Looking You in the Back of the Head, an enquiry into the problem of personal identity, asked thirteen women to try to describe themselves. Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, her first feature documentary, won a 1999 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary and premiered at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival.

The Holier It Gets documents a trek Baichwal took with her siblings to the Ganges River with their father’s ashes. The film won Best Independent Canadian Film and Best Cultural Documentary at Hot Docs 2000, as well as two Geminis. The True Meaning of Pictures is an award-winning feature-length film on the work of Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams.

Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about the work of artist Edward Burtynsky, premiered at TIFF in 2006 and won Best Canadian Feature Film and has since received a Genie for Best Documentary, as well as the Toronto Film Critics’ Award for Best Canadian Feature and Best Documentary.

Baichwal founded Mercury Films Inc. with Nick de Pencier in 1998. Her current project is Act of God, a documentary on the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning.

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