Conviction

Over the last 30 years, Teresa MacInnes’ films have tackled some of the most crucial social justice issues of our time. Her passion and balanced approach to producing and directing have engaged audiences around the world.

She has won numerous awards and her films have screened at Hot Docs, Vancouver International, Margaret Mead, IDA, Barcelona, NY and Thessaloniki. In 2014, her documentary Buying Sex was named one of the top ten feminist films streaming on US Netflix by MS Magazine. Her latest documentary, Mabel, recently won the prestigious 2017 Banff Rockie Award for best Social/Political Documentary. Teresa currently serves on the board of directors of Hot Docs and DOC Atlantic.

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Ariella Pahlke is a Canadian documentary and video artist, curator, and educator living in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia. With a background in philosophy, Ariella has spent the past seventeen years creating documentaries and independent shorts, collaborating on multi-media performance pieces, curating, and teaching. Her film and video work has been shown on television, at festivals and in galleries throughout Canada and the US, and in Norway, India, New Zealand, and South Africa. Her teaching experience includes instructing video in the public school system, facilitating collaborative documentaries with community groups, and teaching video and documentary classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and at the Arctic College in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

Ariella’s artistic practice is grounded in a subjective and personal investigation of the rural context she lives and works in. The documentary stance in her work is often muddied by her choice to blur the roles of observer and instigator. In an essay for the MSVU Art Gallery exhibition, “Roots and Shoots,” Kathleen Tetlock writes: “Ariella’s documentary practice is inseparable from its generative community, politics, and historical context. Each work is also about process. …Her vibrancy is an extremely controlled vehicle for the provocation of chaos, which unfailingly destabilizes the status quo.”

In 2009, Ariella completed Burning Rubber, a one-hour documentary examining rural car culture and burnouts as a disregarded form of creative expression. Burning Rubber aired on Bravo and is showing at film festivals in Canada and in the US, recently winning the Yorkton Film Festival’s Golden Sheaf award for best point of view documentary. Ariella has also recently coordinated a project for the United Way, mentoring a group of adults in Dartmouth North and producing three short documentaries with them about their community. She is presently developing a digital documentary project with the NFB called What will remain? examining memory and choice in the context of ageing and dementia. She is also completing two videos – an independent experimental documentary titled What you did before you were born, and a video about C@P sites, exploring the value of community access to information technology and the internet.

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