Canadian Documentary in the Global Context

The last thirty years have seen an enormous expansion of documentary practice and the proliferation of documentary across a wide variety of platforms on a global scale. This expansion comes at a time of increasing global integration and the growing need to address problems on a planetary scale, such as climate change, refugees and mass migration and continuing armed conflicts around the world. Canada is a founding nation of documentary practice and continues to be a world leader, advancing the use of visual and audio documentary to address global economic, environmental and cultural challenges and recording the human experience. Incorporating clips from relevant films, this talk will address Canadian documentary practice in the global context and examine the traditional role of documentary to record and reveal human stories and to ‘speak truth to power’ in an increasingly integrated world. About the Lecturer: Tim Schwab is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal where he teaches video and sound production and documentary studies. He has produced and directed numerous documentaries including THE BURNING BARREL, winner of the Distinguished Achievement in Documentary award from the International Documentary Association, and the acclaimed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary BEING OSAMA, broadcast on television networks worldwide. His feature documentary CINEMA PALESTINE was released 2014 and has played in over twenty film festivals in North America, the UK and the Middle East