KATERINA CIZEKCurrently, she is developing an experimental program with the National Film Board of Canada called Filmmaker-in-Residence – a program that partners media with medicine in order to fuel social and political action. Cizek’s recent film about new technologies and human rights, Seeing Is Believing (co-directed with Peter Wintonick) won the prestigious Abraham Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival, among other prizes and nominations. It showed on television in over 15 countries, and played at more than 70 international film festivals. The film also screened at MoMA in New York City as part of the Sundance Institute’s Illuminated Voices Series. She wrote, edited and narrated the 1996 Dead Are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda, which was translated into 12 languages, and garnered prizes in New York , San Francisco Golden Gate, Biarritz, the European Echo Humanitarian Award and played at INPUT Mexico. She is a two-time Gemini nominee, and the co-recipient of a 2000 Montreal New Talent Award. Cizek also has made films on the Czech velvet revolution; worked in Aboriginal Gang Territory; investigated a global people-smuggling ring; and directed a series of reports about the battle over water in Central Asia. While traveling to make films, she’s had a few odd experiences, including singing “Yesterday” in a Korean karaoke café in the Uzbek desert; conducting an interview in Czech with the Chief of Police in the African nation of Guinea-Conakry; and being screened for foot-and-mouth disease on a remote highway on Mindanao Island in the Philippines. Cizek received a degree in anthropology from McGill University. Her work has appeared in print, TV, radio as well as New Media. She has produced and directed for CBC-radio and CBC-television, and her writing has been published in Walrus Magazine, THIS Magazine, Video For Change (a book published by Pluto Press in the U.K.), a textbook on film by McGraw-Hill in the USA , and a book on film in Germany. She also lectures widely. Cizek is both Czech and Canadian, and currently lives in Toronto.
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