Andrew Cividino

Canadian filmmaker Andrew Cividino received stellar critical reviews for his feature film debut "Sleeping Giant" (2015), a coming-of-age story about friendship and competition between three teenaged boys facing their impending adulthood. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1984 and raised in the community of Dundas, Cividino attended Ryerson University's School of Image Arts, where he met many of the key players in the creation of "Sleeping Giant," including co-producers Karen Harnisch, James Vandewater, Aaron Yeger and Mark Swenker. The group soon collaborated on several short film projects, including the Cividino-directed dark satire "We Ate the Children Last" (2011) and "Yellow Fish" (2012) before planning their first feature effort. Cividino, Yeger and Blain Watters penned the script for "Sleeping Giant," which secured and then lost funding, forcing Cividino to refocus his project as a short film. The project, also titled "Sleeping Giant," won the Youth Jury Prize at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, which attracted the attention of executive producer Aeschylus Poulos. He helped Cividino and his team complete the original, feature-length version, which reaped numerous awards on the international festival circuit, including Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and a Golden Camera nomination at Cannes that same year.