Weekend With... Patricia Rozema

Weekend With... is a series that offers audiences the chance to dive deep into the work of a filmmaker, actor, or creative over the course of one weekend.

Considered part of the informally defined collection of independent filmmakers to make up the Toronto New Wave in the 1980s and early 1990s, filmmaker, television director, artist, and educator Patricia Rozema (b. 1958) found breakout success at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival when her first feature, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, nabbed the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Director’s Fortnight section, making it the first English-language Canadian film in the festival’s forty-year history to win an award. Rozema’s subsequent career, which has encompassed narrative features, shorts, documentaries, and episodes of hit television series as both director and writer, maintains her first feature’s lighthearted irreverence, stylistic bravado, eye for magical realism, and distinctly queer sensibility.

Currently inspiring the next generation of filmmakers as an adjunct professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television, Rozema joins the Academy Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive for a weekend-long trip through her playful outlook on artmaking.