2017 - Andrea DORFMAN’87

A few days later, she paid for the developed reel of film, brought it back home and threaded it into the projector. As black and white images flickered onto the screen, Andrea was mesmerized. “It was simply magic, that’s how I remember it. I watched my friend jumping off the swing, again and again, and it was like another world. I was hooked.”

 

It became a passionate hobby. Fellow Branksome students might remember “that girl with the camera,” presenting her latest monster film at school assembly. “It was Grade 7 or 8. I had this little film a friend of mine and I made in a graveyard. We played piano music live to it at the student assembly. It was so cheesy and terrible — my friend was the fair maiden, putting flowers on her lover’s grave. I played a predator. It was sort of a horror film.”

 

It was an early indication of a recurring and powerful theme in Andrea’s later work — women overcoming adversity, danger and social taboos.

 

Andrea caught the eye of critics in 1998, when she burst onto the scene with two films: Swerve, the story of a group of friends who go on a road trip and become part of a lesbian love triangle, and Nine, a docudrama about a nine-year-old girl facing separation anxiety. The Atlantic Film Festival named the 29-year-old the most promising director of the year.

 

Andrea followed up two years later with Parsley Days, a comedy shot on a $65,000 budget, about a young woman who hopes to end her unwanted pregnancy by gorging on parsley. The comedy premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to more positive reviews —“endlessly charming” wrote The Globe and Mail — and signaled that Canada had a new, innovative woman director on the scene.

 

Now based in Halifax, Andrea has become a prolific filmmaker, with dozens of documentary and feature films in her iMDB profile (not to mention music videos to pay the way). She doesn’t aim for commercial films, but rather makes films to make a difference, or show us those who do. Consider The Girls of Meru, a film that follows the inspiring 160 girls who take the Kenyan government to court for not protecting them from rape.

 

“They won,” says Andrea. “What motivates me to make films? Social justice, children’s rights, environmental activism, feminism.”

 

Want to see the power and intimacy of Andrea’s work? Go to YouTube and watch How To Be Alone, the four-minute video poem she made with her friend, the poet Tanya Davis.

 

“We were just sitting around and thought we should do something about being alone, a topic of conversation we often returned to,” recalls Andrea. “Tanya wrote a beautiful poem. We made it into a short film.”

 

The film critic, Roger Ebert, loved it and tweeted it out. Eight million have watched it since. “It’s the little film that keeps on ticking,” says Andrea with a chuckle.

 

Yes, Andrea Dorfman — that young girl who so many years ago opted for the old-fashioned Super 8 over going digital — has gone viral.