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Ruth Lawrence

Ruth Lawrence

Directing

Biography

Ruth Lawrence is a filmmaker based in St. John’s, NL. Ruth’s feature films include Little Orphans (Best Canadian Feature, Whistler Film Festival 2020), Hopeless Romantic (2018), and the comedy feature, Party Pirate, sold-out its opening Gala overnight at the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival in October 2023. Her documentaries A Lot of Love in the Room (2021) and Circus by Komatik (2019) have been featured on CBC Gem. She has directed, written, and/or produced on over 70 short films and webisodes. She’s writing two features, one with Sherry White and one with Emily Bridger. Ruth’s honours include the Joan Orenstein Best Actress Award, the RBC Michelle Jackson Award for Emerging Filmmaker, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Artist of the Year, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, the YWCA Woman of Distinction, a WIFT-AT WAVE Award, the national Leslie Yeo Award for Volunteerism, and the inaugural Ross Leslie Award for her contributions to film and theatre.

Known For

Heritage Minutes
7.3

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

Heritage Minutes

1991Series