A funny thing happened to Creative Excellence Award winner Jennifer Baichwal on the way to her PhD and life as an academic.

‘The projected irrelevance of my position in that world really got to me,’ recalls the acclaimed documentary filmmaker. ‘I realized that maybe five people read my Masters thesis [in theology] – and that included my advisor and four readers.’

This revelation prompted a career shift from pedagogy to documentary, but it hasn’t changed her focus. And she continues to ask the big questions.

‘I’m still interested in the same subjects that I was then,’ says Baichwal, ‘but I was looking for a more lateral way of exploring those issues. There’s something about film, which has an incredibly powerful combination of words and motion pictures.’

Her first film, Looking You in the Back of the Head, was an exploration into the impossibility of personal identity that asked 13 women to describe themselves and served as her trial by fire.

‘I made incredible mistakes – like editing on VHS tapes with no time code,’ she says with a laugh. ‘And [I] got interviews that were probably 40 hours in total.’

She followed this up with a six-year project on the life of celebrated novelist Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky) called Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1998 and effectively launched her career.

‘If I talk about mentors,’ says Baichwal, ‘they would be [people like producers] Daniel Iron and Sheena Macdonald, who first took a chance on us at Rhombus Media. They let us use their edit suite because we had no money to finish [Let It Come Down].’

Macdonald remembers what she initially saw in Baichwal. ‘Jennifer’s incisive approach to her subject matter is what first attracted me to her work,’ says Macdonald, president of Rhombus International. ‘Her ruthless honesty transfixes the viewer and confronts them – at times with worrying truths.’

Baichwal’s body of work has been driven by a consistent need. ‘There are so many things in the world that I find intriguing, or problems that I want to figure out,’ she says.

Most recently, Manufactured Landscapes – which was this year’s winner of the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at TIFF – tackles the sustainability of the world’s natural resources as expressed in Ed Burtynsky’s haunting large-format photographs of industrial wastelands in China and Bangladesh.

‘I knew the film would have to begin with the photographs as the starting point rather than a biography of him or a portrait of an artist,’ says Baichwal, whose film has played for an extended seven weeks in Toronto by late November and will be released in the U.S. by Zeitgeist Films in early summer next year.

‘For a distributor, she’s a dream to work with, as she’s interested and astute in all aspects of the business,’ says Macdonald of Baichwal.

Given her life as an independent docmaker, where so much of her work is done in solitude (Manufactured Landscapes took eight months to edit), Baichwal was genuinely surprised when she got word she was selected for a Crystal Award.

‘I feel completely intimidated by all the CEOs and high-powered industry women,’ she says. ‘And I don’t think of myself as in that league at all. I still think of myself as operating somewhat marginally.’

She adds, though, that most of her interaction with WIFT members comes at the end of the filmmaking process.

‘[Post-production after picture editing] is not something you do in isolation,’ says Baichwal. ‘You need a community of committed professionals to help realize and make [the film] happen. If we didn’t have those people, I don’t know what we’d do.’