A fter 16 years of directing and producing documentaries, Viveka Melki has launched her own film, television and visual arts company to create a space for diverse voices.

Melki (pictured) is founder and president of Montreal-based company Melki Films Inc., which has several projects in production and is dedicated to developing high-quality documentary and drama programming for Canadian and worldwide audiences, as well as curatorial work for global art galleries and museums.

“I think, if anything, the last few years have shown us how resilient we are, both as an industry and as artists,” Melki tells Playback Daily. “I believe that all of our projects are in some way or another about human nature in a borderless world. I consciously seek out the cultural solitudes of this country and, now more than ever, is the time to give voice to these solitudes under a communal shingle.”

Born in The Gambia, West Africa, Melki co-founded Quebec prodco Tortuga Films in 2006 with the late Adam Pajot Gendron. She produced Campesinos (2006) and Hippocrate (2011), and directed the two-part series War Correspondence (2014) for Radio-Canada and RDI under the banner. The multilingual artist, who identifies as a racialized settler to Turtle Island, sold her interest in 2014 but continued to make films for Tortuga until 2020 as an independent filmmaker.

For Tortuga, Melki’s films, some of which were made as English-language originals and others in French, include the feature-length doc After Circus; and the 2017 film for Radio-Canada, Carricks: Dans le Sillage des Irlandais (Carricks, In the Wake of the Irish).

Bringing her experience of having lived, and worked, in repressive regimes to her storytelling, Melki says her new company’s projects “will focus on the powerful human, emotional stories that emerge from dramatic social, economic, political and historical events and situations.”

Melki Films’ slate of productions includes the documentary Branded (working title) for CBC’s The Passionate Eye, both TV and festival/theatrical versions. The doc on domestic sexual trafficking across Canada is currently in production, set for release in 2023.

Other productions on the docket include the TV and festival/theatrical versions of the doc Butterfly Hunters (working title), for Telus in British Columbia and Alberta. The project, about sexual trafficking in Western Canada, is in production and set for release in 2023.

The Eric Brunt Collection (working title), currently in production in partnership with the Canadian War Museum (CWM), sees filmmaker Eric Brunt having conversations with some of the few surviving Canadian veterans of the Second World War. The project will be a highlight of the CWM’s upcoming “In Their Voices” database, set to launch in 2024.

The docu-animation Alouette, in production and set for completion in 2024, is an 11-minute film funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, New Chapters Program, featuring Second World War Hong Kong POW camp veteran Douglas Rees.

Melki Films also has several projects in development, including the feature-length doc Roadside Heroes from Melki and Brunt, a director and editor at the new company. The two will co-direct the look at an LGBTQ+ filmmaker criss-crossing Canada, recording the untold stories of marginalized Second World War veterans who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour.

Also in development is the French-language original Gene d’Espoir (Gene of Hope), based on the life of Audrey-Ann Bélanger, who travelled to China for a controversial stem cell treatment.

The Melki Films production team also includes Debra Kouri as producer (Branded and Butterfly Hunters).

“Ideally, racialized people and women should have been incorporated as the storytellers of history a long time ago,” says Melki. “The societal issues that we address in our projects are ongoing and, though it may have felt like the world stopped due to the pandemic, the urgency of our subjects remains constant. The films that we do often deal with the shadow-side of a story, and the silence of COVID-19 gave us an opportunity to listen more attentively.”