About Michelle Latimer
Michelle Latimer is an award-winning director, writer and showrunner whose films have screened at festivals globally, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Berlin International, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Cannes, The National Art Gallery of Canada and the MoMA. Her recent documentary feature adaptation of Thomas King's book Inconvenient Indian (Bell/NFB), along with the groundbreaking supernatural drama series Trickster that she co-created and directed, both premiered in official selection of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. She is one of a select number of filmmakers in the history of the festival who has had multiple works shown in the same year at TIFF.
Inconvenient Indian was awarded the Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice Award and the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature and was named to Tiff's "Top Ten Films for 2020". It also received the Director's Guild of Canada "Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary", the Festival Grand Prix at RIDM, as well as the Magnus Isaacson Award for Social Justice Filmmaking and the Vancouver International Film Festival Audience Choice Award.
Trickster (Sienna Films/Streel Films/CBC), which Michelle directed and also served as showrunner, Co-Creator and EP, premiered at TIFF to rave reviews and was named by Playback Magazine as the Best Scripted Series for 2020, was nominated for 15 Canadian Screen Awards and won for Best Television Drama Writing at the Writers Guild of Canada awards. The series sold in the USA to the CW Network and streaming platforms AMC's Shudder and SundanceNOW.
Michelle was the showrunner and series director for the breakout Indigenous resistance series RISE (Viceland). RISE premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Series. Her episodes are widely considered to be one of the most comprehensive documentations of the Indigenous led occupation at Standing Rock to exist. She has directed episodes of the drama series Burden Of Truth (CBC/CW/Hulu) and comedy series Little Dog (CBC), and has written for Frontier (Netflix/Discovery).
Select film works include: Choke (2011), which received a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Mention in International Short Filmmaking, was chosen as one of TIFF Canada's Top Ten in 2012 and nominated for a Canadian Screen Award; The Underground (2014), which premiered at TIFF and won the Best Short Film Prize at the ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival, as well as the Canadian National Screen Institute Drama Prize and was selected for Telefilm's Talent Showcase at Cannes. Nimmikaage (2016) which was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada; and the feature-length documentary Alias, which was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. Her film Nuuca (Field of Vision), examines the impact the oil industry has on increased rates of violence towards Indigenous women and girls in the Bakken oil fields of South Dakota. The film premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and screened at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and Berlinale Film Festival before it was shortlisted for an IDA Award.
In 2020, Michelle was named the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs and was awarded the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Award, a prize given to five international filmmakers for their work in social-justice filmmaking. She is a previous Field of Vision Fellow and holds a BFA in Theatre Performance and Film Studies from Concordia University, Montreal.
In 2017, Michelle was invited to present a Ted X Talk on her experiences documenting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In her speech entitled Lessons from the Land: Peace Through Relationship, Latimer explores how traditional knowledge has informed an approach to land stewardship and the ongoing fight for Indigenous sovereignty.
