Features Panel

CTT Panelist

Meaghan Brander
Meaghan Brander holds a degree in Film Studies from Queen's University. She has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Group for seven years, most recently as a Film Circuit Manager, TIFF's outreach programming division devoted to promoting Canadian cinema across Canada. In this capacity, she has had the opportunity to coordinate screenings of some of Canada's best and most popular films at venues as far-reaching as Dawson City, Yukon, to festivals in Australia, Iceland, and South America.

CTT Panelist

Jacqueline Brodie
Born in France, educated in Paris, Jacqueline adopted Montreal in her early twenties and became a Canadian citizen. She started her career as a freelance writer for CBC/Radio-Canada. She later jumped into the worlds of publicity and journalism before being hired as a communication representative by the National Film Board of Canada.

She then was appointed Deputy Director of the Canadian Government Film Festival Bureau in Ottawa, promoting Canadian films and their creators around the world for over a decade prior to reconverting to freelancing. As a Press Attaché, Publicist and Film Festival Consultant, she worked for the Festival of Festivals under the direction of Helga Stephenson, helping her to promote and build the event now known as The Toronto International Film Festival. She also worked at the Vancouver Film Festival, the Banff World Television Festival, and the Venice Film Festival.

For fifteen years, she was the Publicity representative for Canada of the Trade paper from France, Le Film Français. She worked for Telefilm Canada as Publicist and Press Attaché at home and abroad, in particular at the Cannes Film Festival, promoting Canadian filmmakers. She still works at Cannes as a TIFF Consultant and accredited journalist covering the event for various papers, including the French language weekly L'EXPRESS DE TORONTO.

Her continuing association with TIFF as Special Communications Consultant started in 1984 and is still going twenty-seven years later.

Jacqueline has sat on film festivals juries including Yorkton (Canada), Chicago (U.S.A.), Taormina (Italy) and Valladolid (Spain).

CTT Panelist

Helen Faradji
Based in Montreal since 1999, Helen Faradji has had a passion for movies for as long as she can remember. Holding a Ph.D. for her study on the cinema of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino, she started as a film-critic at l'Université de Montréal's CISM 89.5FM, then at the weekly newspaper ICI before becoming editor-in-chief of revue24images.com, the weekly webzine associated with the magazine 24 Images. She's also a blogger for MSN and started recently as a film critic, with Georges Privet, at Radio-Canada's morning show Médium Large.

CTT Panelist

Marc Glassman
The recipient of the Toronto Arts Award in literature in 2000, Marc Glassman is an editor, journalist, broadcaster and the artistic director of This is Not a Reading Series, a multi-disciplinary programme that explores the creative process in literature.

Marc is the Editor-in-chief of Point Of View, Canada's leading magazine on documentaries and independent cinema. He is also the editor of Montage, the Directors Guild of Canada's periodical. He reviews film every week for Classical 96.3 FM.

Marc won the Tom Berner Award in 2003 for extraordinary support of independent filmmaking. He is one of the founders of the Images Festival, was the first international curator for Hot Docs, and the initial programmer of the National Film Board's Toronto theatre for five years. Marc was the long-time proprietor of Pages, a leading Canadian independent bookshop, which closed its doors after thirty successful years of operation in the fall of 2009.

CTT Panelist

Peter Howell
Peter Howell is the movie critic for The Toronto Star, a post he has held since 1996. He writes regularly on Canadian film, including an annual opus on Canadian features at the Toronto International Film Festival. Besides reviewing movies, conducting interviews and writing a column for the Star, Howell also blogs (First Reel) and tweets (@peterhowellfilm). He is an honours graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa, where his Bachelor of Journalism studies included courses on film and Canadian literature.

CTT Panelist

Brenda Lieberman
Brenda studied Arts and Cultural Management at Grant MacEwan University, in her hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. After graduating in 1999 she noticed a lack of world-class media arts programming in Calgary, and moved south to help fill this void by programming independently for a number of festivals for the first few years of her career, while mentoring with a number of industry professionals. Brenda took a leap in 2003 and founded the Calgary Underground Film Festival. In 2004 she began working for the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF), and has been CIFF's lead programmer since 2007. She now splits her time between both festivals while also lending expertise to several start-up festivals. In 2009 Brenda was awarded Avenue Magazine's Top 40 Under 40 award.

CTT Panelist

Andrew Murphy
Andrew was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He began working with the Atlantic Film Festival in 1999, assisting in the programming department. In 2001, he was brought on full time to help develop and program the ViewFinders International Film Festival for Youth, which celebrates its 11th year in April 2012. Andrew is currently the Programming Manager, overseeing the AFF Programming Department, helping secure Galas, Special Presentations as well as independent titles for the festival and its niche programs such as The Late Shift, That's So Gay, and ViewFinders@AFF. Andrew has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and a Bachelor of Journalism, and is still finding new ways to put them to use.

CTT Panelist

Patricia Rozema
Patricia Rozema is one of Canada's most accomplished and internationally recognized filmmakers. Her film credits include I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, White Room, When Night is Falling, Mansfield Park, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and Grey Gardens, among others. I've Heard the Mermaids Singing won the coveted Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. That same year, it 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 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, recently, an episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series In Treatment. Rozema received a PEN USA nomination and an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing for her work on the HBO movie Grey Gardens, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Most recently she directed several episodes of the CBC series Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays. She has several projects in development including an adaptation of Robert Munsch's beloved classic, The Paperbag Princess and Carol Shields' Pulitzer Prize winning Stone Diaries.

CTT Panelist

José Teodoro
José Teodoro was born in Kingston, Ontario. He studied acting at Red Deer College, theatre creation with One Yellow Rabbit, and screenwriting at the Canadian Film Centre. He has been artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre, Gibraltar Point, Annex Theatre and Playwright's Theatre Centre. He is the author of the plays The Tourist, Slowly, an exchange is taking place and Cloudless. He is the co-author, with Mexican photographer Laura Barrón, of Cathedral, a three-meter-long text/photo book and, with Mexican novelist Andrés Acosta, of ‘Mérida,′ a prose collaboration published in dANDelion and by La Mano Izquierda Press. He has written about film and literature for Film Comment, Brick, The National Post, Cinema Scope, The Globe and Mail, Stop Smiling and Cineaste. He lives in Toronto.

CTT Panelist

Blaine Thurier
Blaine Thurier is a Vancouver based writer/director, musician and cartoonist. He is best known as a member of the internationally celebrated rock band The New Pornographers. He has written and directed the features Low Self-Esteem Girl (00), Male Fantasy (04), and A Gun to the Head (09), which have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Slamdance and many other festivals. His videos for The New Pornographers have been celebrated in The New York Times and Rolling Stone.

Shorts Panel

CTT Panelist

Manon Dumais
Based in Montreal, journalist Manon Dumais is the film editor of the weekly Voir, which she joined in 2001. Over the years, she's written film reviews for La Presse, Séquences and Médiafilm.ca. She also was a film critic on 98.5's Isabelle le matin, and Radio-Canada's AM, Du côté de chez Catherine, and Je l'ai vu à la radio. Since 2008, she's been the film critic on Télé-Québec's Voir — a two-time Gémeaux Award–winning cultural magazine.

CTT Panelist

Peter Knegt
Peter Knegt is a journalist and film festival programmer. A graduate of the University of Toronto and Concordia University, he has written for Variety, Xtra!, Exclaim!, Playback, HitFix, and, most notably, indieWIRE, where he has been an Associate Editor since 2008. Outside of journalism, Knegt has also worked for the Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Reel Asian, and Image+Nation, and programmed the inaugural Reel Out Film Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 2011, he co-founded Picton Picturefest, a film festival and youth retreat in rural Ontario. Currently, he continues to work with both indieWIRE and Picton Picturefest and serves on the advisory board of the University of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. His first book, a historical account of Canada's lesbian and gay rights movement, was released in the fall of 2011.

CTT Panelist

Yves-Etienne Massicotte
Host and producer of movie reviews, presentations and interviews at TFO for over ten years, Yves started producing a weekly half-hour show last year called Arrêt court, a showcase of French-Canadian short films. He also directed his first documentary, A Monk's Secret, produced by the Ontario studio of the National Film Board of Canada. He is currently working on his second documentary film.

CTT Panelist

Karina Rotenstein 
Karina Rotenstein is an independent producer and curatorial consultant, and Associate Producer for Yoav Shamir's latest documentary "10%". Most recently for four years, Ms. Rotenstein served as Programming Manager at Hot Docs, where, in addition to Festival programming, she curated and hosted the monthly Doc Soup series in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Edmonton, she also managed the Shaw Media-Hot Docs Funds. Prior to Hot Docs, for five years, Ms. Rotenstein programmed dramatic and documentary features, as well as shorts programmes for the Miami International Film Festival, has been a programming consultant for the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival, and Jakmèl Film Festival in Haiti. She has served on numerous film festival juries, including TIFF 2011 Short Cuts Jury, the Calgary International Film Festival, Bahamas International Film Festival, and Silverdocs.

CTT Panelist

Barbara Shrier
An accomplished producer well known in the Montreal film industry, Barbara Shrier has over twenty years of production experience. From Louis Malle to François Girard, Shrier has worked with some of the best and brightest on the Québec and international film scene. In 2001, Shrier produced Francis Leclerc's Une jeune fille à la fenêtre (Girl at the Window). Her next feature was Mémoires affectives (Looking for Alexander), winner of four Jutras (including Best Film) and three Genies. The summer of 2008 saw the successful release of her third collaboration with Francis Leclerc, Un été sans point ni coup sûr (A No-hit, No-run Summer). She also co-produced Frédéric Dumont's first feature Un Ange à la mer (Angel at Sea), with Belgium's Dragons Films, which went on to win the Crystal Globe for Best Film at the Karlovy Vary film festival. Barbara's first foray into the English-language film world was Tara Johns' first feature entitled The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom, released in 2011. Her commitment to first-time filmmakers continues with the development of Aube (Dawn) Rosa Zacharie's debut feature. She also has two other projects on her slate with longtime collaborator Francis Leclerc: TV series Territoires (Territory) and feature film Cendres de cailloux (Stones and Ashes).