Features Panel
Liane Balaban
Liane Balaban was born and raised in Toronto. Her first film, New Waterford Girl, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1999. She has since appeared in eight feature films at TIFF (and two TIFF shorts). In 2010 she was nominated for a Genie award for her supporting role in Michael McGowan's One Week, and for a Gemini award for her leading role in the CBC film Abroad. She also costarred in The New Tenants, winner of the 2010 Oscar for best live action short. Her upcoming projects include Gary Burns' documentary-feature hybrid The Future Is Now, a new play by Michael Ondaatje, and Daniel Dimarco's The Apologist. She is currently co-producing Crankytown.net in partnership with the NFB.
Linda Barnard
Linda Barnard grew up in London Ont. where her love of movies was nurtured by matinees at the old Century and The Capital (and summer nights at the still-operating Mustang Drive-In). A journalism graduate of Ryerson University, she has covered beats from City Hall, to medicine, to news during 20 years as a reporter for the Toronto Sun, joining the Toronto Star in 2001 where she worked on a variety of sections, including spending six months as the paper's restautant critic. But Barnard found her home in the entertainment department in 2004, where she is the movies editor and is a movie writer for Canada's largest daily newspaper. Fittingly, she lives in Toronto's Beach neighbourhood in a loft in a converted 1930s-era movie house.
Matt Bissonnette
Matt Bissonnette was born and raised in Montreal. He has written and directed three feature films, Looking For Leonard. Who Loves The Sun, and Passenger Side which premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and made it to Canada’s Top Ten that year, and one novel, Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Felix (Fil) Fraser, C.M., D.Litt(Hon)
FIL FRASER has been a life-long broadcaster, journalist, television program director and CEO, and a television and feature film producer. Based in Edmonton, he is the author of the best-selling memoir, Alberta’s Camelot – Culture and the Arts in the Lougheed Years and Running Uphill and the Fast, Short Life of Harry Jerome, a biography of the Canadian Olympic sprinter, soon to be a feature documentary film produced by the National Film Board. Fraser is an adjunct professor of Communications Studies at Athabasca University where he teaches a graduate course on film policy. He is a former Chief Commissioner of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and the former CEO of Vision TV. When he’s not trying to improve his tennis, he keeps his journalistic chops up by writing a column on corporate ethics for Alberta Venture. He has two more books under way; a biography of Toronto radio station owner, Denham (Flow 93.5, Toronto and The Bounce, Edmonton) Jolly, and a novel built around Black immigration to British Columbia in the 1850s.
Teri Hart
Movie Entertainment’s Teri Hart is Canada’s multi-platform entertainment personality, taking television, radio and online audiences from behind the scenes to the front of the line through her unparalleled access to the biggest names in show business. Teri first burst into living rooms in 1996 as host of The Movie News (later known as @ The Movies). Over two thousand interviews later, Teri is a favourite with viewers and movie-stars alike and has become a fixture on red carpets, press junkets and film premieres. Born in Brantford, Ontario, Teri studied broadcasting at Humber College. Before joining The Movie Network, Teri worked at radio stations Q107 and CFNY and CKNX. Teri is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA), Women in Film & Television (WIFT), Canadian Women in Communications (CWC) and the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. In addition to Movie Entertainment – on-air on The Movie Network and HBO Canada and online at themovienetwork.ca – Teri can be heard on Entertainment Extra, NewsTalk 1010, as well as Astral Radio stations Virgin, Boom and many more. Although her interviews include the “who’s who” of Hollywood, Teri is also an ardent champion of emerging Canadian filmmakers, and was among the first to turn the spotlight on Canada’s now-established storytellers such as Michael McGowan, Sudz Sutherland and Deborah Chow.
Peter O’Brian
Peter O'Brian is a Canadian film producer. His credits include The Grey Fox (82), My American Cousin (85), John And The Missus (87), Far From Home (95), and many others. A Genie winner and Golden Globe nominee; former Executive Director of the Canadian Film Centre (1988-91), longtime former Board Member of the Toronto International Film Festival Group (1984-97), O'Brian is currently Board Chair of TVOntario (2005-).
Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo
Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo is a Canadian feature film programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival. Since joining TIFF in 2004, she has held several positions including head programmer for TIFF’s Canadian short film section, Manager of Canadian Programming responsible for year-round short film programming initiatives, Manager of Programme Administration, and international programming associate for the Festival’s Italian selection. Smoluch Del Sorbo has served as a lecturer in American cinema at the University of Genova in Italy and sat on juries at The National Screen Institute, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the Ontario Film Review Board and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten Shorts. She has written for Take One, the Canadian Film Encyclopedia, and in 2010 contributed an essay on filmmaker Patricia Rozema to the book The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers. Smoluch Del Sorbo holds a Master of Arts in Cinema Studies from York University.
Kari Skogland
Kari Skogland was born in Ottawa and started her career working on commercials and music videos. She went on to direct many television films and series, and was nominated for two Gemini awards. Her film credits include Men with Guns (97), the television feature White Lies (98), Liberty Stands Still (02), Chicks with Sticks (04), The Stone Angel (07) and Fifty Dead Men Walking (08), the latter of which went on to be a Gala presentation at TIFF08, was voted as one of Canada’s Top Ten Feature films of 2008, and won two Genie Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay.
Bruce Sweeney
Bruce was born in Sarnia, Ontario. He received a B.A. in visual art and communication from Simon Fraser University and an M.F.A. in film from the University of British Columbia. He studied directing under Mike Leigh at a master class in 1991, and won the best Canadian feature award at the Festival in 1995 for his first film, Live Bait. His subsequent feature films include Dirty (98), Last Wedding, which was the Festival’s Opening Night Gala and was voted as one of Canada’s Top Ten Feature films of 2001, American Venus (07) and Excited (09).
Kim Yutani
Kim Yutani is a Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and the Director of Programming of Outfest. She also oversees the Outfest Screenwriting Lab and the programming for Fusion: the Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival. Kim was recently part of the programming team for RAW CUT Filmfest, a hardcore/punk rock-inspired film festival in Warsaw, and was a guest curator for Cinemasia in Amsterdam and the Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. She has served on juries at the Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, and the Teddy Jury at the Berlin International Film Festival. Prior to her film festival work, Kim was a film critic and freelance journalist focusing on independent film.
Shorts Panel
Deborah Chow
Deborah Chow was born in Toronto. She directed her first film while an undergraduate at McGill University and completed her M.F.A. in film at Columbia University. Her graduate film Daypass (02) screened at numerous international festivals and won several awards. Her second short The Hill (04), screened at TIFF. She attended the 2005 Berlinale Talent Campus and the Talent Lab at the 2005 Festival, and received the inaugural Kodak New Vision Mentorship under the guidance of director Patricia Rozema to direct her debut feature, The High Cost of Living (10), which won the SKYY Vodka Best Canadian First Feature Film Award at TIFF.
Philippe Gajan
A Breton in the land of Quebec, but of course. An engineer in the land of cinema, why not? After arriving to Montreal in 1994 as an engineer in aeronautics, Gajan started to write for 24 Images in 1995, for ICI in 1998 and then for the Festival du nouveau cinema in 1999. A film critic with an eye onto the world, a smuggler of gazes, passionate about rising to the call of seeing and hearing in new ways, beholding the whisper as outcry… Riding the same momentum, he transitioned into programming in 2000, and editorship of 24 Images in 2005, not in order to play judge but to defend—inch by inch, work by work—a certain kind of off-the-beaten-path cinema, that which is championed by the Festival du nouveau cinema, and more specifically, that which is embodied by short films, the laboratories of free form and ideas.
John Greyson
John Greyson is a Toronto video artist/filmmaker whose features, shorts and installations include Fig Trees (Best Documentary Teddy, Berlin Film Festival, 2009), Proteus (Diversity Award, Barcelona Gay Lesbian Film Festival, 2004), and Lilies (Best Film 'Genie', 1996) and Zero Patience (Best Canadian Feature, Toronto International Film Festival, 1993). An associate professor in Film at York University, he was awarded the 2007 Bell Canada Award in Video Art.
Allison Mack
Since beginning her career at age 4 in commercials, Mack has continued to be a busy working actress with an impressive roster of roles. She has starred in The Opposite Sex, Evening Shade and My Horrible Year! and Disney’s animated film The Ant Bully amongst others. Mack’s talents extend beyond film and television. She received rave reviews for pulling double duty, both as a choreographer and performer, in Rent and Chicago. Mack was then offered the chance to make her directorial debut with Jer Bear Productions' staging of Hair. Rave reviews all attest to Allison's diversity in the entertainment field. Music and dance, as much as acting, remain a passion. Mack is about to finish her role on Season 10 of the hit series Smallville.
Sudz Sutherland
Born and based in Toronto, Sudz Sutherland is a writer and director who went to film school at York University. His first feature film, Love, Sex & Eating the Bones, won the best Canadian first feature film award at TIFF in 2003. He went on to direct episodes of Da Kink in My Hair, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Wild Roses. Next up was Doomstown, a CTV movie of the week which won Gemini Awards for best TV movie, best supporting actress and best direction. Sutherland’s most recent miniseries, Guns, starred Colm Feore and Elisha Cuthbert and aired on the CBC. Sutherland co-created and co-executive produced the half-hour comedy She’s the Mayor, and his upcoming feature, Home Again, is set among the lives of deportees in Jamaica.