Gisèle Gordon was born in London, England and lives and works in Toronto, Canada. In 1996, she formed the production company Urban Nation with Cree filmmaker and visual artist Kent Monkman. She directed and produced the feature-length documentary, The Tunguska Project, which uses Cree theatre director Floyd Favel’s physical journey from Saskatchewan, Canada to the site of a mysterious explosion in Tunguska, Siberia as a metaphor for the mystery and struggle of creative process. The Tunguska Project premiered at Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival in 2005, was broadcast in Canada on Bravo! and IFC, and was awarded Best Feature Length Film at the Planet in Focus Film Festival, 2005.

She co-directed, with Kent, Group of Seven Inches, a satire on the artistic colonisation of Canada’s First Peoples, which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005, and Robin’s Hood, which was presented as part of the Miss Chief Trilogy installation in the Forum Expanded programme at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2008. A complete retrospective of all Urban Nation films was featured at the Terres en Vues Festival in 2008, where the Miss Chief Trilogy was awarded the festival’s grand prize, the Teueikan award. Other short works as director include Girls With Opinions (Images Festival 2002), a subtle critique of media influence on public opinion, shot at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, 2001 as part of the Blah Blah Blah: (re)Viewing Québec video artists’ collective. She has produced and/or was key collaborator on all of Kent Monkman’s film and video works, including three award-winning shorts, Blood River (CBC broadcast, 2004) and A Nation is Coming, (Sundance Film Festival 1997) and Shooting Geronimo (Toronto International Film Festival 2007, Berlin International Film Festival 2008).

Her installation work includes the site-specific Iskootāo, a sound and light installation collaboration with Kent Monkman, featuring live performance that transformed a 650-tonne billion-year-old chunk of the Canadian Shield into the pulsing heart of the earth (commissioned for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, 2010). She is currently developing a video, light and sound installation, The Land that Dreams, using one slice of land to investigate the 12,000 year history of Toronto and explore the nature of storytelling and memory.

Gisèle began programming for the Canadian section of Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, in 2007, and now programs for the international section. She programmed drama, documentary and new media work for the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival for 8 years. Her independent curation includes a programme of Canadian films for the Salekhard Northern Nomadic Film Festival in Russia in 2005. Gisèle is a freelance writer whose work will be published in the upcoming book, The Movie Machine: Histories Of Toronto Moving Image Culture. She also writes for such clients as the National Film Board of Canada. Gisèle has been involved with film festivals since she started working at the Toronto International Film Festival as a publicist in 1990. She served on the board of directors for the Images Festival from 2003 to 2006, and on the board of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival for 8 years, which she continues to serve an advisor. She is currently advisor to the New Media Festival Committee at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre.

Filmography

As Director

• Robin’s Hood, experimental drama, 6:00, 2007 (Co-director with Kent Monkman), also Director of Photography
• Group of Seven Inches, experimental drama, 7:00, 2005 (Co-director with Kent Monkman)
• The Tunguska Project, documentary, 82:32, 2005
• Girls with Opinions, documentary, 3:30, 2001
• Sugar, documentary, 10:00, 2001

As Producer/Creative Collaborator

• Dance to the Berdashe, five channel installation, 12:00, directed by Kent Monkman, 2008, also Super 8 photography
• Shooting Geronimo, drama, 11:00, directed by Kent Monkman, 2007, also Director of Photography
• Blood River, drama, 23:00, directed by Kent Monkman, 2000
• A Nation is Coming, experimental dance film, 22:00, directed by Kent Monkman, 1996