Playback is providing a deep dive into the careers of our 2022 10 to Watch recipients. This year’s cohort were selected from 217 submissions and represent a wide array of film and TV talent as producers, writers, directors, and executives. Stay tuned for additional profiles over the next month.

It was a fateful snowstorm in Moncton, N.B. in 2018 that set Josiane Blanc on her path as the prolific producer, writer and director she is today.

The Montreal-born and Toronto-based filmmaker was in town for the National Film Board of Canada’s Tremplin contest for her short documentary Tales of Ordinary Fatphobia and was stranded in the airport for five hours waiting for a flight back to Toronto. She spent the hours chatting with fellow finalist Ania Jamila, and by the time she came home she knew she’d met her future business partner.

“We still strongly believe that destiny conspired in some sort of weird way for us to spend a lot of time together,” Blanc tells Playback Daily.

Within the next four years the duo formally launched their shingle Sahkosh Productions and produced a short-form scripted series Ainsi va Manu (Hog Town). Blanc says the company currently has approximately six projects in active development or pre-production, including a second longer-form season of Ainsi va Manu and the 8 x 30-minute scripted project Hotel Beyrouth.

Blanc initially had ambitions to be a journalist, but says she soon realized that her real passion was in telling stories about people, and began to explore documentary work. She decided to travel abroad, aiding the creation of documentaries in Ecuador and France, and later went back to school in Canada to build up her skills in film production.

She moved to Toronto in 2015 and was hired as a researcher at French-language channel TFO for children’s series FLIP by former senior producer Philippe Montpetit.

“She can do everything,” says Montpetit. “She has the drive, she has a lot of energy, and a lot of good ideas.”

It was while working at TFO that Blanc pitched Montpetit the concept of a documentary on exceptional teenagers, which the company greenlit as the short docuseries Jeunes d’exception (Amazing Teenagers) in 2016. It was her first opportunity to be a director on a documentary project, according to Blanc. “I was just out of school and didn’t have any portfolio to back up the idea that I could actually do this,” she says.

“As soon as I met Josiane, I felt something different [about her],” adds Montpetit, who says Jeunes d’exception was one of the “best series” created during her time with TFO. “I gave her a chance and I trusted her and she did an amazing job.”

Ainsi va Manu was Blanc and Jamila’s first scripted project, a 7 x 13-minute short-form series about a teenage girl who decides to fight back when a potential sale to a real estate developer threatens to evict her family from their home. Blanc created the concept in the early days of the pandemic when people around her were constantly contending with eviction notices and she needed an outlet to “evacuate all that frustration,” she says.

The project received financial support from Telefilm’s Talent to Watch fund, as well as from French channel TV5’s Créateurs en série Fund for emerging creators. TFO came on board to help finalize the production funding, allowing them to tap into the province’s tax credits.

Blanc says writing, directing and producing the series came with a steep learning curve when they went to camera in November 2020, contending with the added cost of COVID-19 safety measures with a small budget. She recounts having to go door-to-door to find an affordable location to serve as the apartment building. “[Ainsi va Manu] was so many firsts for so many people,” she says. “It was my first series, my business partner’s first production as well as the first TV role for the mother and daughter actors [Cindy Charles and Sandra Dorélas], and they’re nominated for prix Gémeaux this year.”

Her work in the scripted world includes Festivale, touted as the first bilingual anthology series by Black Canadians and currently in development with Bell Media’s Crave. Blanc says she was approached by executive producer Marie Ka to be one of three Francophone writers to take part in the bilingual writers room. “[It was] really important for the producers to make sure that there was representation of Francophones outside of Quebec,” she says.

Blanc says she feels strongly about creating and working on bilingual projects, and that as a person who speaks four languages – French, English, Creole and Spanish – “multiplicity of language is really ingrained in the content that I create.”

As an example, while Ainsi va Manu is primarily in French, parts of the series are also in English, Spanish and Cantonese.

On the unscripted end of things, Blanc is in post-production on the one-hour documentary Words Left Unspoken, which she directed and produced alongside Rayne Zuckerman. The doc was shot in Lebanon and explores the story of Joze Piranian, who overcame a severe stutter that left him speechless to become a public speaker.

Blanc says she hopes the film sheds light on how debilitating a severe stutter can be on someone’s life, and is planning to run an impact campaign along with the documentary’s planned 2023 release to show it in schools.

“I always have a social impact aspect to whatever I do,” says Blanc. “[That] is where my heart is.”