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...male-dominated industry, resisted lure of Hollywood (though not of Europe) and reached the enviable status of auteur filmmaker. Praised and revered, criticized and censured, her filmmaking has provoked strong reactions on both sides of the spectrum.
Born in 1958 in Kingston, Ontario, Rozema was raised in southern Ontario by Dutch Calvinist parents and educated in Canada and the U.S. at Christian schools. While completing her B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rozema decided that she would become a journalist. She worked at television news stations in the U.S., and as an associate producer at CBC's The Journal in Toronto, but she soon realized her powerful attraction to the world of fiction and, in 1985, enrolled in a filmmaking course at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. While gaining industry, experience as Don Owen's assistant on Unfinished Business, third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly, as well as on a number of television shows, Rozema began submitting her own proposals to art councils. Though she had little success initially--proposal after proposal was rejected--Rozema persisted and that persistence paid off brilliantly.
Right from the start of her narrative filmmaking career, Rozema quickly began to establish the thematic and stylistic terrain that would later come to define her entire oeuvre. Her films are elegant fairy-tale like stories inhabited by idiosyncratic outsider protagonists, typically struggling artists, set on paths toward enlightenment. Throughout her body of work she maintains a graceful feminist consciousness and has established herself as a remarkably sensual visual sty, list. But there is also a vibrant, formal adventurousness in Rozema's work, marked by self-referential narration and a rich intertextuality, which has also come to define her signature style.
Rozema's vision is an inquisitive, active vision that pushes boundaries, searches for context, reinvents and engages other cultural works in meaningful ways. Her search for knowledge, some sort of truth, is revealed in both her method of making films and the journeys of the characters she creates. This auteur's thematic concerns are that of authorship itself: the struggle and processes of creativity and self-expression, the immeasurable value of artistic creation, the questioning of traditional aesthetic standards and the relationship between...
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