Donald M^cWilliams is a documentary filmmaker whose work makes use of both live-action and animation techniques. He was inspired to become a filmmaker after meeting Norman McLaren in 1968. M^cWilliams would later work with McLaren, and this led him to make two films about the acclaimed NFB animator: Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) and Norman McLaren: Animated Musician (2014). Having also met McLaren’s long-time collaborator, Evelyn Lambart, M^cWilliams happily agreed to make Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart in 2017. The film gave him the opportunity to bring Lambart out of McLaren’s shadow and recognize her contribution to his success, while highlighting her own beautifully crafted animation.

M^cWilliams’ other films include a trilogy of historical film essays: The Passerby (1995), awarded Best Cultural Documentary at the 1997 Hot Docs festival and selected as one of the 50 best filmic essays by the Vienna Film Festival in 2007, The Fifth Province (2003), and A Time There Was: Stories from the Last Days of Kenya Colony (2009). M^cWilliams also produced and edited Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square, which was nominated for the 1999 Oscar® for Best Documentary Short.

M^cWilliams taught experimental animation and documentary production for several years in Norway. The Writers Guild of Canada has nominated his work twice for a best documentary script award. M^cWilliams has been a part of the NFB Animation Studio for close to four decades and was named Honorary President of the 2016 Ottawa International Animation Festival, a testament to his influence in animation circles.

Maral Mohammadian is a producer at the renowned National Film Board of Canada’s Animation Studio in Montreal. Her award-winning auteur films include I Am Here, directed by internet sensation Eoin Duffy, and the innovative mixed-media film The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer, directed by Randall Okita. Maral has helped to develop some of Canada’s top rising talents through the NFB’s internationally recognized Hothouse apprenticeship program, which has spawned a series of one-minute hit films. In addition to animated films, she produces multimedia and interactive projects with a distinct artistic edge.

Michael Fukushima has been making films since 1984. He joined the NFB in 1990 to direct the animated documentary Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), winner of the Hot Docs Best Short Documentary award. Michael became an NFB animation producer in 1997, co-founding the NFB’s flagship emerging filmmaker program, Hothouse, in 2002 and was appointed executive producer of the NFB’s fabled Animation Studio in 2013.

Some notable films in his filmography include Genie Award winner cNote (2004), by Chris Hinton; Shira Avni’s animated documentary Tying Your Own Shoes (2009), which won the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig and the prestigious NHK Japan Prize; Muybridge’s Strings (2011), by Oscar-nominated Japanese filmmaker Koji Yamamura; Oscar-nominated films Dimanche (2011), by Patrick Doyon, and Me and My Moulton (2014), by Torill Kove; and, most recently, Cordell Barker’s If I Was God… and Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses. Michael now mostly produces the producers and offers up sagacity, but he continues to keep his hand in—this year, on the first short film in two decades by Oscar winners Alison Snowden and David Fine, and on Oscar winner Torill Kove’s new film, Threads.