Michael Ostroff

An impressionistic exploration of the spirit that informed the solitary life of one of Canada's most celebrated and irrepressible painters. Emily Carr began painting in an era when women didn't, at an age when most people shouldn't, traveling to remote locations that few professional adventurers chose to go. Not only did she adopt the painting techniques of modernism, when such ideas were considered dangerous, Carr chronicled the extraordinary art and culture of native peoples, who were invisible to the dominant culture.

Directed by Michael Ostroff (Pegi Nicol: Something Dancing About Her (2004)) and produced by Mary Sexton (Gemini Award Winning Tommy... A Family Portrait (2001)), and Heather Eustace, To Think Like a Composer is a joyful and exuberant introduction to the world of Canadian composer, conductor, educator and renaissance man Stephen Hatfield. A documentary that reveals the creative collaborative excitement and tension as Hatfield and Susan Knight and Shallaway Youth Chorus of St. John's produce an opera performed by youth for adults. An opera based on the novel Ann and Seamus by Kevin Major. There are no patronizing platitudes in Hatfield's work. The opera deals with sadness, heartbreak, and the joy of existence - the Newfoundland ethos - as interpreted in a story of shipwreck, survival, and love on the Isle Aux Morts off the southwest coast of Newfoundland in 1828.

Something Dancing About Her is an affectionate portrait of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, a charismatic yet relatively unknown painter. Shedding fresh light on her place in Canadian art history, director Michael Ostroff chronicles the life of this remarkable creative spirit who threw herself into painting, left-wing politics and love affairs with equal enthusiasm.