Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is an award winning Canadian film director and screenwriter. Today's Out Spotlight is Patricia Rozema.

Patricia Rozema was born August 20, 1958 in Kingston, Ontario and raised in Sarnia, Ontario, the daughter of Jacoba Berandina and Jan Rozema. She grew up in strict Dutch Calvinist home where television was severely restricted and she didn’t go to a movie theatre until she was 16 years old. Rozema went to study philosophy and English literature at Calvin College in Michigan where she received her degree. She continued her education at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

After a brief stint as a print and then television journalist (CBC Television’s The Journal), she directed her first feature, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, a serious comedy about a socially inept Girl Friday (Sheila McCarthy as Polly), which made one of the most outstanding feature debuts in the history of Canadian cinema. At the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing won the Prix de la Jeunesse. That same year, it was voted one of Canada’s ten best films ever as polled by 100 international critics.

Rozema also directed the Six Gestures (part of the Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach television series), which combined images of Yo-Yo Ma performing with skating sequences by figure skating legends Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, interwoven with J.S. Bach's first-person narrative. Six Gestures was nominated for a Grammy and was awarded a Prime Time Emmy, for Outstanding Classical Music-Dance Program, as well as a Golden Rose, the top television award in Europe in 1998.

She then directed the romance, When Night Is Falling in 1995 starring Pascale Bussières, and including Don McKellar and Tracy Wright.

Her next two films were made outside Canada. Mansfield Park, shot in the UK, is a revisionist adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel of that name. Mansfield Park opened the 1999 World Film Festival in Montreal, the Chicago Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival in San Francisco and was featured as a special presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Happy Days, an Irish production, is a film version of Samuel Beckett’s humorously despairing play in which a woman lives partially buried in a mound of sand. Happy Days is part of The Beckett Film Project (a project aimed at filming all of Beckett's plays), which includes work by directors David Mamet, Neil Jordan, Anthony Minghella and Atom Egoyan.

Throughout her career Rozema has also written, directed, edited and produced a number of short films, including Passion: A Letter in 16mm (1985); Urban Menace (1986); Desperanto (1991) as part of Montreal Vu Par; This Might Be Good (2000) for the Toronto International Film Festival; and Suspect (2005) which was reproduced in the journal Alphabet City 10 – Suspect (MIT Press).

Her film credits also include White Room and When Night is Falling,premiered in competition in the 45th Berlin International Film Festival and went on to win over 30 awards from different countries and at various gay and lesbian film festivals. It was voted one of the top 200 films of the 20th century “Top 200 of 2000” by the Chlotrudus Society of Independent Film. White Room earned 4 prizes, and 3 Genie nominations.

Rozema’s television credits include the pilot and two subsequent episodes of HBO’s groundbreaking dramatic series Tell Me You Love Me, an episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series In Treatment, and episodes of the Canadian television sitcom Michael, Tuesdays and Thursdays, scheduled to debut on CBC Television in fall 2011.

The made for television movie Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which she directed and ghost wrote, was based on the phenomenally successful American Girl book series. The film earned Rozema a Director’s Guild of Canada Award nomination for Best Director and New York Times critic A. O. Scott hailed actress Abigail Breslin for turning in one of the top five female performances of the year

Rozema and co-writer Michael Suscy received an Emmy nomination (Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special), a Writers Guild of America Award nomination (Long Form – Original) and a PEN USA Award nomination in Screenplay for the very successful HBO movie Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

Rozema lives with her partner Lesley Barber.