CINESIEGE

Rick Hancox grew up in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, and all three locations have informed his finely crafted experimental documentaries, which fuse personal landscapes with issues of time, memory and history. His work demonstrates, through the cinematic image, how personal memory is mediated by social and historical contexts.

Hancox often blends the poetic with the cinematic, as in his trilogy of "poetry films" – Waterworx (1982), Landfall (1983) and Beach Events (1985). He is also known for autobiographical documentaries such as Home for Christmas (1978) and Moose Jaw (1992), which hailed by Take One magazine as one of the ten best films made in Canada at the time.

Hancox taught at Sheridan College for 12 years, where he influenced a generation of Canadian independent filmmakers including documentarians Alan Zweig, Janis Cole and Holly Dale, and experimental filmmakers Richard Kerr, Philip Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom and others, who, along with Hancox, have been recognized as belonging to a movement in Canadian cinema known as the Escarpment School. He has been professor of film in the Communication Studies Department at Concordia University since 1985.

Patricia Rozema's feature films include I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, White Room, When Night is Falling, Mansfield Park, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and Grey Gardens. I've Heard the Mermaids Singing won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and that year was voted one of Canada's ten best films ever as polled by 100 international critics.

Rozema won an Emmy Award and was nominated for a Grammy for her film Six Gestures, part of the series Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach. Her work on the HBO movie Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, earned her a PEN USA nomination and an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing.

Other television credits include the The Beckett Film Project's Happy Days, the pilot and two subsequent episodes of the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, and most recently, an episode of the HBO series In Treatment. Most recently she directed several episodes of the CBC series Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays. Projects in development including an adaptation of Robert Munsch's beloved classic, The Paperbag Princess.

Documentarian Alan Zweig frequently uses film to explore his own life. In Vinyl (2000) he investigates what drives people to become record collectors, using his own experience to delve into the effects of this passion on a life. I, Curmudgeon (2004), a film about self-declared curmudgeons, shot on a camcorder with Zweig using a mirror to record his own experiences, won a Silver Hugo at the 2005 Chicago International Film Festival. Lovable (2007) addresses our (and his) preoccupation with finding romantic perfection.

Zweig moved from autobiographical subject matter to explore the struggle of ex-convicts to lead normal lives in A Hard Name (2009), which received a Genie Award for best documentary. Many of Zweig's films have premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which devoted its Focus On screening series to Zweig's work in 2012.