In 2004, as one of the winners of the Reel Diversity filmmaking competition sponsored by the National Film Board, Zarqa Nawaz found herself at the Banff Television Festival. Though she had already made two short films, and was in the process of creating an hour-long documentary for the NFB called Me and the Mosque, she wasn’t quite sure how to make the most of the festival. Then she saw a familiar face. Anita Doron, a fellow screenwriter and director, coached her on putting together a television pitch and helped her access one of the festival’s popular pitching sessions.

Three years of nonstop work later, Nawaz is the creator of CBC Television’s highly rated new comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She and Doron are among almost 100 filmmakers who are alumnae of the Women in the Director’s Chair workshop (WIDC) at The Banff Centre, an intensive program of writing, story development, and directing that boosts the careers of women directors.

Started in 1996 as a partnership between The Banff New Media Institute, ACTRA, and the newly created Creative Women Workshops Association, with support from Telefilm Canada and dozens of other sponsors, WIDC was a response to a very real shortage of women directors in film and series television in Canada (estimated at the time at less than 10 per cent of all Directors Guild of Canada directors). The eight women who participate each year are in mid-career, often as stage directors, or directors of music videos or short films, who are ready to take a leap into feature film directing or television.

The program provides them with a cast of actors, and mentors in the crafts of cinematography, directing, and story editing, with full crews behind the scenes, and access to The Banff Centre’s television production and editing facilities. Each participant comes with a film concept and takes that concept through all stages from script development to screen.

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in this business before,” says Anne Wheeler. “If you don’t have a film under your arm, you’re not going anywhere. Film is such an expensive art, you have to raise a lot of money just to get started. If you haven’t got anything to show, they just won’t take you seriously.”

Wheeler, one of the most accomplished film and television directors to come out of western Canada in the past 30 years, was WIDC’s mentor director in its first year, and its tenth. To her, the program is essential and unique, an opportunity for women to get a feel for the enormous responsibility and decision-making pressure that comes with the director’s role. She also appreciates the lasting connections WIDC makes for women in all roles in film and broadcasting.

For Nawaz, those connections were key to her experience in Banff, along with the opportunity to learn casting and work with experienced actors in a difficult genre – comedy. “That process was humbling,” she says. “Working with actors, you have to work quickly to understand their intentions, and learn how it connects to writing and rewriting scenes.”

Currently part of the writing team for Little Mosque on the Prairie, which has embarked on a second season, Nawaz hopes to direct an episode during the third season, and to get a feature film project off the ground. When she does, she’ll add to the small, but closely connected ranks of female directors in Canada.

“What’s almost magical about this program is that lasting personal and professional relationships develop,” says WIDC founder and producer Carol Whiteman of the Creative Women Workshops Association. “WIDC is a spring-board for these directors’ future successes.”

Published: July 2007.