Director BIO: Vivien Endicott-Douglas (PREY)

Director Biography – Vivien Endicott-Douglas

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Prey is Vivien’s directorial film debut although she has increasingly been interested in engineering her own projects. She was a casting associate for the short film For Nonna Anna (recent recipient of a Sundance Special Jury Prize), is currently producing a short film entitled Chickens (directed by Canadian Screen Nominee Andrew Moir) and is creating her first web series, Big ART, set to shoot this summer. Her work behind the camera has a special focus on queer and female driven narratives.

As a performer, Vivien has been working well over half her life in film, television and theatre. At twelve years old she landed the series lead in BBC/ CBC co-production Shoebox Zoo for which she garnered a BAFTA Scotland nomination. Since then her work as a performer in television and film has been extensive and includes featured and recurring roles on TV shows Hemlock Grove, Copper, Murdoch Mysteries, Rookie Blue and The Line. Vivien starred in the highly acclaimed Canadian Film Centre short How Eunice Got Her Baby and was nominated for an ACTRA award for her work in the independent feature film The Shape of Rex. Most recently she featured in short films Let Me Down Easy (selected for Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent screening at Cannes) and She Stoops To Conquer (Toronto International Film Festival Selection) and starred alongside Elizabeth Rohm in the Lifetime thriller Forget and Forgive.

Vivien has directed and performed extensively for the theatre performing regularly for many of Canada’s most celebrated theatre companies including the Canadian Stage, Tarragon Theatre, The National Arts Centre, Theatre Aquarius and Crow’s Theatre. This spring she will be starring opposite Diana Bentley in the award winning horror/comedy Category E at Toronto’s popular Indie theatre The CoalMine.

 

Director Statement

 

As women, we are predominantly conditioned to believe that we must sacrifice our own happiness and comfort for the sake of staying in a relationship. The relationship is paramount. It takes a great deal of will to be able to free ourselves from this reality and shift the paradigm. Prey is the beginning of one woman’s journey to come home to herself. It documents the first step, the realization that she cannot have the full life she wants, be the whole person that she knows she is capable of being if she is in attachment with either of these men. She craves something more; an independence, to find her own fire and she must be willing to step into the unknown, alone, in order to begin her process of self- actualization.

By femalefilmfestival

The irony of this festival is that its goal is to not be around in 5 years time. To eventually not be relevant because there is zero need to have a festival geared for female talent and female stories because the stories presented in Hollywood and around the world are a balanced showcase of the human experience from both sexes. Our goal is to achieve a lot of success and then fold into oblivion simply because there is no need for this festival. This festival was created by the FEEDBACK Film & Writing Festival as a simple reaction to a strong need to showcase female talent from around the world in a more profound way. When putting together the weekly festival, the administration noticed a lack of a female presence in the stories being shown at the festival. A classic example and analogy to the frustration is how the festival noticed that even the smaller roles in a screenplay were written for a man to play. There was zero reason for this in many stories. How a police officer, or a political campaign manager, for example with 3-4 lines in a screenplay was a "HE" character. Why? And these are the screenplays written by the winners! The talented one who have obtained agents and have began/beginning their careers as a writer.

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