The DOC Institute has named Bizable Media’s Janice Dawe (pictured left) and filmmaker Noura Kevorkian (pictured right) as the recipients of the 10th annual DOC Institute Honours Awards.
The Ontario chapter of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC) named the recipients of its two achievement awards on Monday (Nov. 20), which celebrates pioneers and visionaries in Canadian documentary filmmaking.
Industry veteran Dawe, the co-founder and president of Bizable Media, is the recipient of this year’s Luminary Award, which recognizes an individual whose leadership has made a significant contribution to the Canadian documentary filmmaking community.
Kevorkian, meanwhile, will be presented with the Vanguard Award, which honours emerging or mid-career filmmakers whose unique creative vision has marked them as a talent to watch.
The award recipients were determined by a jury of industry peers, which this year included filmmakers Sylvia Hamilton and Tamara Dawit, and the Toronto International Film Festival’s chief programming officer Anita Lee.
Dawe (pictured left) has logged more than three decades in the Canadian documentary community as a producer, executive producer and executive. She currently serves as president of Bizable Media, a Toronto-based consulting firm she co-founded in 2015 that provides production financing and business affairs services to the film and TV community. Recent productions she has contributed to include Chelsea McMullan and Sean O’Neill’s Swan Song and Tasha Hubbard’s nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up.
Among other roles that Dawe has held, she spent eight years as VP and executive producer at White Pine Pictures, overseeing development and production of the company’s doc and scripted slate. She also notably served as co-chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, the forerunner of DOC, and helped to launch the very first Hot Docs festival in 1993.
Kevorkian (pictured right), the recipient of the DOC Institute’s Vanguard Award, was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon before moving to Canada at age 17. She made her filmmaking debut with the award-winning Veils Uncovered, about the veiled women of Damascus, and followed that up with the historical documentary Anjar: Flowers, Goats & Heroes and the hybrid drama-doc 23 Kilometres. Her latest film, Batata — which covers 10 years in the life of an unmarried Syrian woman confined in a refugee camp in Lebanon — received a Peabody Award in 2022.
Dawe and Kevorkian will be presented with their respective awards at an in-person ceremony on Dec. 5.
This story originally appeared in Realscreen