fiction.wikisort.org - Director

Search / Calendar

Mark Achbar (born in Ottawa in 1955[1]) is a Canadian filmmaker, best known for The Corporation (2003) and Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1994).

Mark Achbar
Born
Canadian
OccupationDirector, Producer

Biography


Achbar is a graduate of Syracuse University's Fine Arts Film Program. He interned in Hollywood on the children's TV programme Bill Daily's Hocus Pocus Gang, followed by a three-year stint in Toronto with Sunrise Films on their documentary series Spread your Wings and the CBC/Disney series Danger Bay. He then teamed up with director Robert Boyd, and received a Gemini nomination for Best Writer on The Canadian Conspiracy, a cultural/political satire for CBC and HBO's Comedy Experiments hosted by Martin Mull, and featuring Canadian-born stars: Eugene Levy, Lorne Greene, Leslie Nelson, William Shatner, Morley Safer, Howie Mandel, Peter Jennings, John Candy, Dave Thomas, Margot Kidder, and Anne Murray. The fake documentary chronicled Canada’s secret takeover of the United States. The program won a Gemini for Best Entertainment Special and was nominated for an International Emmy.

Achbar moved into independent media, working in many capacities on films, videos, and books. With Peter Wintonick, Achbar co-directed and co-produced Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which was, until the release of The Corporation Canada's all-time, top-grossing feature documentary. Achbar’s companion book to the film hit the national best-seller list in Canada.

Achbar collaborated with Jennifer Abbott to create Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage, a video diary by the couple who became known as Canada's first legally married same-sex couple. This true story of "boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy becomes girl" received festival invitations from around the world and was broadcast in Canada on Pridevision and the Knowledge Network.

In 1997, Achbar initiated a project titled The Corporation with author and University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan. Bakan wrote the film and book, while Achbar co-directed, produced and executive-produced the film, with Jennifer Abbott joining the team as co-director and editor in 2000. The film was released theatrically in 2004 and stands as the all-time, top-grossing feature documentary ever made in Canada. Encore+, a Youtube portal for "classic" Canadian films and TV shows, shows over 8,263,108 views of the film (Sept 15, 2022), which it posted in 2017, its top-ranked title out of 2,500+ titles. Manufacturing Consent is in second place with 7,380,819 views as of Sept 15, 2022—an indication of the importance of the issues the film explores.

Telefilm, a Canadian film and television financing agency, had a generous reward program for producers of successful theatrical films. Until 2004, those films were only dramas. The Corporation changed that. For the first time, a documentary’s box office gross qualified it for a “performance envelope” – a kind of exclusive reserve fund for the top 15% of producers whose films gross over $1m. A total of $2.38m was awarded to Achbar's company, Invisible Hand Productions Inc, which he put into ten Canadian feature documentaries, five in development and five in production, which helped lock in $270,000 of development financing and a further $5.85m of production financing for those productions. The completed, theatrically-released productions which benefited from this funding are Velcrow Ripper's Fierce Light, When Spirit Meets Action; Denis Delestrac's Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space, Kevin McMahon's Waterlife, Frederick Gertten's Bananas: Poison in a Banana Republic; Mathieu Roy's and Harold Crooks' Surviving Progress; and Oliver Hockenhull's Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicine.

As an EP, Achbar is advising, and helping, in a small way, to finance four feature documentaries:

Asher Penn is making a film about Gabor Mate, renowned trauma doctor and therapist.

Holly McGowan is making Calling All People a film (5 years in progress) about TemPeSt Grace Gale, a 25 year old singer, activist, poet, artist, marionette maker, who was murdered on Hornby Island.

Jen Muranetz is making Standing With The Ancients, a film about the standoff happening now between environmental activist protesters and police at Fairy Creek.

And Bart Simpson’s (yes that's his real name, and he had it first) film on Mad Magazine founding editor Harvey Kurtzman.

Achbar helped shoot, and is an EP on DOSED2-The Trip Of A Lifetime

Achbar continues his film career as an executive producer of feature documentary films. He has contributed his videography skills to two animal rights videos, Penny's Story and Meat The Victims: Excelsior Farms.

Achbar is co-founder, with Sarah Butterfield, of Speakables, a stealthy Vancouver technology startup which designs novel offline speech-to-text devices to assist the deaf and hard of hearing.


Selected films


Director and Producer:

Executive Producer:


Awards



Awards for The Corporation





Nominations or semi-finalist


References


  1. "Festival Archive (1952–2020)".




Текст в блоке "Читать" взят с сайта "Википедия" и доступен по лицензии Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike; в отдельных случаях могут действовать дополнительные условия.

Другой контент может иметь иную лицензию. Перед использованием материалов сайта WikiSort.org внимательно изучите правила лицензирования конкретных элементов наполнения сайта.

2019-2024
WikiSort.org - проект по пересортировке и дополнению контента Википедии