Jennifer Abbott


Jennifer Abbott is a Canadian director and editor, who specializes in social justice and environmental documentaries. She is best known as the co-director and editor of the documentary, The Corporation, which examines large corporations in the 21st century. The documentary received 26 awards, including a Sundance Film Festival award, a Genie for best documentary and a top ten film of the year by the Toronto International Film Festival - though disqualified from the Oscars as an Ontario broadcast preceded the LA theatrical release.
Abbott co-wrote and edited Sea Blind, about the sea route opening along the melting Arctic Ocean and the price of shipping our stuff. It screened at the 2015 Paris climate talks and is making the rounds to the ports of Europe projected onto walls of shipping containers.
Abbott is the co-writer, co-director and editor of Us and Them, about four homeless and addicted street people shot over the course of 10 years, and the executive producer and editor of I Am. She was commissioned to create the short film Brave New Minds for the interactive website Unspeak by Amsterdam's Submarine Channel. Abbott's first feature documentary, A Cow at My Table, explores contemporary Western attitudes to livestock and meat production. Her early work includes the experimental short Skinned screened at NY's Museum of Modern Art. She has taught at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver and lives on a permaculture farm on a small island on Canada's West Coast.

Career

Filmmaking

Abbott's first film was A Cow at My Table. The film addresses the ongoing battle between animal advocates and the meat industry in hopes to educate the Western consumer. Five years in production took Abbott across Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to meet with leading activists for the animal rights movement, as well as spokesmen from livestock industries.
In 2000, Abbott collaborated with director Mark Achbar to create '. The documentary is a low-budget video diary of the first legally married lesbian couple in Canada. The film received multiple festival invitations, and was later broadcast on Canadian television networks.
Abbott continued her collaboration with Achbar in 2003 when they co-directed the critically acclaimed documentary film, The Corporation, written by Joel Bakan. The project began when Achbar and Bakan met at a funeral and realized they were both interested in globalization and its impact on society. The fact that no one had yet made a documentary on this issue shocked them both, so they decided to create one themselves. The film critically explores modern day corporations and the rise of dominant upper class institutions through the evaluation of corporate behavior towards society and the world at large. Through incorporating interviews with 40 corporate insiders and real-life case studies, Abbott hopes that the film will ultimately inspire strategies for change. During the directing/editing process, Abbott went through over 800 pages of interview transcripts. These transcripts were digitized and narrowed down until she felt the material had narrative flow and would resonate emotionally with the audience. It was important to her that the documentary did not force ideas onto the audience, but rather to ask more questions and keep it open to interpretation. During the filming of the documentary, Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
Abbott became involved with the documentary 'I Am after director Tom Shadyac saw The Corporation and invited Abbott to work as the editor on the film. The documentary explores Shadyac's personal journey after a 2007 bicycle accident caused him to suffer from post-concussion syndrome. Abbott had an immediate connection with the film's subject matter, beliefs, and core philosophy. Abbott worked remotely on the film from her home in Canada for two years.
She co-wrote and edited Sea Blind, co-wrote, co-directed and edited Us and Them and directed and edited Brave New Minds''. She is currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada on a new feature documentary about the psychology of climate change.

Awards and nominations

''A Cow at My Table''

Abbott is a graduate of political philosophy from McGill University and lives with her family on a permaculture farm on a small island in British Columbia where they have geothermal heat, solar hot water, an electric vehicle and grow much of their own food.

Filmography

Director