Andrea Dorfman mini-bio: One of Canada’s most promising, versatile and truly independent young filmmakers, Andrea Dorfman started making Super 8 films with friends in high school before graduating from Montreal’s McGill University in 1992. She graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1995 and then wrote, directed, shot and edited several experimental short films through the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op while working as a camera assistant in Halifax’s commercial film industry. An active member of the Co-op, she headed various committees over the years and served on its board of directors.
In 1998 she made her first dramatic short film, Swerve, a road-trip movie centring on an all-female love triangle, as well as Nine, a half-hour documentary exploring a year in the life of a nine-year-old girl diagnosed with separation anxiety. Both films earned her the award for Most Promising New Director at the Atlantic Film Festival and went on to play at many international festivals. Swerve was named Best Lesbian Short at Toronto’s Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, while Nine garnered the Marion McMahon Award at the 1999 Images Festival in Toronto and earned a nomination for Best Short at Toronto’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.
Dorfman then produced, wrote, shot and directed her first feature film, Parsley Days (2000), which she shot in eleven days in the summer of 1999. It premiered to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival®, was named one of Canada’s Top Ten by an independent, national panel of filmmakers, programmers, journalists and industry professionals, won Best Cinematography and Best Actress Awards at the Atlantic Film Festival and was runner-up for Best Film at the Avanca Film Festival in Portugal.
After directing, producing and co-writing three seasons of the award-winning CBC-TV series “Street Cents” from 2000 to 2002, Dorfman made her sophomore feature Love That Boy (2003), which drew consistently positive reviews upon its release and was screened at festivals around the world. Her first feature documentary, Sluts, explores the mythology surrounding high school students who are labeled with the derogatory term and is slated to be broadcast in 2005. She is currently in development on her third feature, Crème de la Crème, with co-writer Jennifer Deyell, and tends to business at Toronto’s Knit Café, of which she is a co-owner.
