Daniela Ponce

Daniela Ponce is a communications professional with seven years of experience in film PR. During this time, she has spearheaded media and community relations campaigns for various film festivals and film programmes, as well as the theatrical and broadcast release campaigns of over 60 films, many of them issue-based documentaries. While working on these projects, Daniela has not only learned about the importance of securing thoughtful media coverage for important causes, but also has come to understand how impactful compelling storytelling can be. Daniela worked at PiF as the Festival Publicist in 2016 and 2017. She fell in love with the Festival over those two years, and while she is now working full-time elsewhere, she is very happy to continue to be involved in Canada’s largest environmental film festival!

Caroline Underwood

Caroline Underwood is an Executive Producer and a Wildlife & Science Documentary Consultant. From 2008-2015 she was Senior Producer/Commissioning Editor for The Nature of Things, the CBC’s flagship science series. Recent series include The Wild Canadian Year, Equus: The Story of the Horse,  Wild Canada and The Great Human Odyssey. She has been involved with Planet in Focus for more than 17 years.

She has produced, directed and written more than twenty-five of her own award-winning documentaries for The Nature of Things and independent production companies. The focus of her work has been the natural world and she has travelled to many remote locations, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, to reveal the beauty, complexity and the threats facing some of the planet’s last great wildernesses and their inhabitants. She has had countless extraordinary wildlife experiences: from standing among half a million caribou, to camping on the tundra where wolves walked past her tent, to unexpected encounters with a grizzly bears in the remote rainforests of British Columbia. No stranger to debate, she has explored many contentious subjects over the years – the use of animals in medical research, wolf management and climate change. She is a founding member and past president of the international organization Filmmakers for Conservation.

Anne Wordsworth

Anne Wordsworth has worked extensively in the fields of environment and health. In association with the Canadian Environmental Law Association and as an environmental consultant, she has written major law and policy reports on chemicals, environmental health, toxics use reduction, water issues, indoor air pollutants and international comparisons of laws. She has also been the Executive Assistant and a Senior Policy Advisor for two Ontario Ministers of Environment and Energy. Her media and communications experience includes production and research for three CBC national television shows: Market Place, Man Alive and The Health Show. Her most recent production is a public education video called “Lead-Stick Beware”, which won the US-based Campaign for Safe Cosmetics’ “Kiss Lead Goobdbye” contest. She is currently doing her Masters in Environmental Studies at York University.

Isabella Cattelan provides strategic financial services and active management to mid-market companies, including mergers and acquisitions CFO services.

Isabella has over 16 years’ experience at the executive level and has held the positions of CFO, COO, and SVP Group Services with various mid market companies including the Globe and Mail.

As an executive and business advisor, Isabella has extensive experience in corporate strategy development and aligning financial strategies and plans to achieve profitability and sustainability objectives. Isabella has a proven ability to be a catalyst for change leading to significant improvements in business performance.

Isabella has travelled to over 40 countries, exploring the planet by foot, canoe, kayak, bicycle and on horseback. She has developed a passion for environmental sustainability, and believes economic growth and strong business performance aligns with planetary prosperity. Isabella has been personally trained by former US Vice President Al Gore and the Climate Reality Project to serve as a volunteer Climate Reality Leader.

Chanda is passionate about using media for social change and public education. She has authored several educational resources, including a pair of 200-page guides for individuals and groups using Living Downstream; two blogs for the National Film Board of Canada’s CitizenSHIFT website; and a monthly column on documentary films and their makers for Troy Media. In 2018, the Documentary Organization of Canada published a 60-page guide researched and written by Chanda, titled The Roadmap to Creative Distribution.

Chanda has trained as an artist-educator with the Royal Conservatory and as a workshop facilitator with the Alternatives to Violence Project. She has led filmmaking workshops in a variety of settings, ranging from universities to public libraries. She is an instructor in the Business of Film and Television post-graduate program at Centennial College’s Story Arts Centre and is a regular workshop facilitator with the DOC Institute, designing and delivering workshops for emerging documentary professionals across Ontario. In 2014, she was an Innovator in Communities with the Toronto Public Library, where she led a series of filmmaking workshops for residents in the underserved communities of North York and Scarborough.

In 2015, Chanda was a recipient of the prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which enables Ontario-based artists to take their work in new creative directions. In 2013, she was named a Woman to Watch by Sydney’s Buzz on Indie Wire.

Chanda is a graduate of Sheridan College’s Media Arts Program. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists; a former board member of the Documentary Organization of Canada; and a founding member of the Toronto Chapter of Film Fatales, an international collective of women filmmakers. Chanda lives in Toronto and is the proud mother of two beloved and badass children, Hannah and Henry.

Kevin McMahon

Kevin McMahon began his career as a newspaper journalist at the St. Catharines Standard before shifting his focus to documentary film in the mid-1980s. His films have been described as “visually stunning and brilliantly conceived” (The Globe and Mail); “poetic and ironic, they deal with important topics and never shirk the difficulties inherent in complex issues” (Take One Magazine). Kevin is currently producing Canadian Made, a 14-part television series exploring the national psyche through innovation. He is also at work directing Planet Zero, an interactive web-based documentary about nuclear weapons. Other projects in development include Powering Spaceship Earth, a collaboration with Japan’s NHK, and Borealis, a feature documentary about the Boreal forest.

Recent films Kevin has directed include Standing Wave, part of Primitive’s National Parks Project, a  26-part television, music and film series, and Waterlife, an exploration of the Great Lakes which produced a feature documentary (Earth Prize, Tokyo Film Festival 2010; Hot Docs Award 2010). Feature documentaries that Kevin has written and directed include: The Face of Victory, Stolen Spirits of Haida Gwaii, An Idea of Canada, McLuhan’s Wake, In The Reign of Twilight and The Falls. Kevin’s documentaries for television include Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach: The Music Garden, Lifting The Shadow, Truth Merchants and the three-part series Cod: The Fish That Changed The World, a collaboration with comedian Mary Walsh. As a producer, Kevin oversaw the 50-episode series Things That Move, about the history and science of motion, and Working Over Time, a four-hour history of Canada, as seen through manual labour. Kevin is theauthor of Arctic Twilight, about the impact of the Cold War on the Inuit, and a contributor to POV Magazine, The Toronto Star and CBC Radio’s Ideas.Kevin’s work has garnered a variety of awards, including several Geminis, a top prize from the Canadian Centre for Investigative Journalism, a nomination for a Governor General’s Award in public service journalism and honors from film festivals around the world. The Canadian Film Institute and Hot Docs have both held retrospectives of Kevin’s work. Kevin is also a frequent mentor to younger filmmakers; in 2006 he served as the first Official Mentor at the Hot Docs festival.Kevin holds degrees from Brock and Carleton universities and the University of Bristol in England. He is a partner in Primitive Entertainment, a Toronto production company specializing in high quality documentary. Kevin lives in Toronto with his three teenaged children.

ALEXANDRA LAZAROWICH is a Cree Producer, Director and Screenwriter whose work has premiered at film festivals around the world. She is passionate about telling indigenous stories. Her most recent documentary FAST HORSE recently premiered and won the Special Jury Award for Directing at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

FAST HORSE can be watched in full at CBC Docs.

Her latest short film LAKE will be premiering at the 2019 Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival, as part of the 5 Minute Feminist Film Program.

Alexandra’s body of work as a director and producer include Indian Rights for Indian Women, Out of Nothing, Cree Code Talker, Crooked Creek, Empty Metal, INAATE/SE/ and Alvaro.

She was also the Creative Director for the new Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Alberta (open October 2018). She directed thirty-one unique audio and video elements for the museum’s new Human History wing illuminating the cultures and histories of the Blackfoot, Cree, Denesųłįné, Dene Tha’, Métis, Nakota and Stoney Nakoda.

Marc Glassman wears many hats in the Toronto cultural scene. The recipient of the Toronto Arts Award in literature in 2000 and the Tom Berner Prize for support of independent filmmaking in 2003, he is an editor, film programmer, writer, broadcaster, an instructor at Ryerson University’s Masters of Fine Arts in Documentary Media programme and the Artistic Director of This is Not a Reading Series, a multi-disciplinary project that explores the creative process in literature.

Marc is the Editor-in-chief of POV (Point of View) Canada’s leading periodical on documentary culture and Montage, the Directors Guild of Canada’s national magazine. He reviews film every week for Classical 96.3 FM.

Marc was the film programmer for the National Film Board’s Toronto theatre, the John Spotton Cinema, from 1991-1996. Currently, he is a senior programmer for the Planet in Focus environmental film festival. He co-authored the book Paul Driessen: Images and Reflexions (2002) and has contributed to a number of books on cinema on such filmmakers as Atom Egoyan, Mike Hoolboom and Ingrid Veninger. For the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Marc has been a curator, jury selection member and part of the advisory board.

Marc is a founder and advisor to the Images Festival, the former Artistic Director of the Ashkenaz Festival of New Yiddish Culture, the initial programmer for Toronto’s Hot Docs Canadian international Documentary Festival and Reel Canada and the long-time proprietor of Pages, a leading Canadian independent bookshop for thirty years, 1979-2009.

Over the past 25 years, Merit has assembled that team and built her boutique company into a production powerhouse, with a reputation for excellence and putting people first. The secret of her success lies in her passion for people, great films and great stories – stories that expand our knowledge of the human condition and reveal the beauty of the natural world, that transport us to place’s unseen and challenge us to develop new ways of thinking.

Thanks to Merit’s calm and steady leadership and “we’ll make it happen” management style, Merit Motion Pictures has emerged as an industry leader with an impressive slate of award-winning documentary and dramatic programs. Those programs have sold around the world and include the long-running, Gemini Award-winning documentary series, Recreating Eden, the international co-production transmedia series One Ocean, and the recently released theatrical feature TuTuMuch. An enthusiastic collaborator, Merit has established strong and lasting relationships with Canada’s leading broadcasters, a wide variety of co-producers and international partners. Co-founder and chair of DOC Winnipeg, she also served as co-chair on Canada’s national task force on non-theatrical film and on numerous other industry boards and committees.