CRUX: The Transformation of AnneBruce Falconer

Louise Abbott is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (ruralroutecommunications​.com). She has spent most of her career chronicling the history and culture of rural and indigenous communities in eastern and northern Canada and examining the social and environmental challenges that face these communities. She has written and/​or directed numerous films, including the first documentary on the history of the Inuit of Nunavik (northern Quebec), which was broadcast on APTN. She researched and scripted The Empty Net, which traced the disastrous collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery in the 1990s. This documentary garnered numerous awards, including Best Documentary (science, technology, and environment) at Hot Docs in Toronto in 1996 and Best Public Affairs Documentary at the Yorkton Film Festival that year. Abbott was a finalist for a Prix Gémeaux for best research in public affairs programming for the French version of the film, Le filet vide. Abbott became an independent filmmaker in the early 2000s. Since then, she has worked for non-profits or on self-generated films with grants from government arts councils or private foundations. Between 2008 and 2018, she collaborated with Cree groups in making a series of documentaries in Eeyou Istchee, the Cree homeland in northern Quebec. Among the films was Nunaaluk: A Forgotten Story, which won the Best Film by an Established Filmmaker award at the inaugural Jasper Short Film Festival and was a finalist for Best Documentary Short at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco. It was also selected for screening at several other festivals, including the Indianer Inuit: Das Nordamerika Film Festival in Germany. In late 2019, Abbott was chosen as one of five Canadian filmmakers to make a short film, The Ahiarmiut: Out-of-the-Way Dwellers, for a project spearheaded by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting called Tell Our Stories. More recently, she has focused on making a series of video poems with women poets in the Eastern Townships, as well as the documentary CRUX: The Transformation of AnneBruce Falconer.

Biographical notes provided by the film production team