Super Channel has commissioned a feature documentary from Ottawa-based prodcos Creatorland and Pelee Entertainment about how the legacy of women filmmakers, particularly those from underrepresented communities, has faced historical erasure.

Know Her Name is in post-production and will debut on Super Channel in 2025 before heading to Hollywood Suite in 2026, which has second window rights.

The film is directed by Zainab Muse and produced by Muse through her Creatorland banner and Heidi Lasi of Pelee Entertainment. Oya Media Group’s Ngardy Conteh George and YN Film’s Munire Armstrong are executive producers.

Know Her Name spotlights the stories of Esther Eng, an openly gay Asian-American director of the ’30s and ’40s, and African-American author and doc filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston. It examines how their works were originally lost and how their forgotten legacies were later revived.

It also focuses a lens on filmmakers such as Louis Weber, Dorothy Arzner and Maria P. Williams and features interviews with Canadian screen industry figures such as Christene Browne, Jennifer Podemski, Jennifer Holness, Deepa Mehta and Barbara Lee.

“We are always interested in telling compelling stories with strong female participation both in front of and behind the camera. As part of our programming mandate, we look for projects that help to amplify the voices of those who are marginalized, including women, BIPOC and LGBTQ2SA+ individuals and we felt this documentary really hit the mark in allowing us to do that,” Super Channel CCO Kimberley Ball told Playback Daily in a statement.

Bringing the project this far has been a more than five year journey for the filmmaking team during which they were told several times by potential funders that the doc was either too niche and didn’t have a wide enough audience or was not “relevant anymore.”

But, if anything, this allowed the team to find the voice of the doc and its storytelling style, Muse tells Playback.

“It allowed us to really hone in on what differentiated our project [from existing docs about gender equity]. And I think Heidi and I were really clear in the fact that we didn’t want to create a documentary that had this sense of defeatedness to it,” says Muse, adding that they started exploring how the film would take on a mystery tone to create a cautionary tale about erasure of work.

It was a Women in Business event in 2018 in Ottawa that set the wheels in motion for the project. That’s where Lasi and Muse connected and conversations about a project centred on women filmmakers started taking shape.

Those conversations were also spurred by the buzz around the films Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther, which were being touted for creating a lot of “firsts” by featuring predominantly Asian and Black casts. “We started thinking, ‘could this really be the first time?’ And that’s what took us into the past,” says Muse.

Lasi and Muse linked with Hollywood Suite president and co-founder David Kines to discuss their initial concept. In 2019, Hollywood Suite came on board with a licence fee offer and development funding, which would later trigger Canada Media Fund (CMF) development funding. The project also received development funding from the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ film festival’s RE:Focus Fund.

The project, however, would require travel to multiple cities in the U.S. and Hong Kong, where Lousia Wei had made the 2013 documentary Golden Gate Girls on Eng. Wei was able to piece together and bring Eng’s story to light through photos of her that were found in a San Francisco dumpster.

The producers needed more financing and a first window broadcaster before they could go into production.

Lasi says the project was “soft-pitched” to then CCO of Super Channel Jackie Pardy, who was interested. But then COVID hit and the shutdowns came.

“Even though Super Channel was interested, there wasn’t a lot of action going on. So we waited it out, we couldn’t shoot. But people were exploring different ways of shooting from a distance which actually helped us in the end when we did shoot,” says Lasi.

The reconnect with Super Channel happened at the 2022 Banff World Media Festival after which they received a “solid yes.”

With Super Channel on board, the producers were able to tap into the CMF regional fund. Lasi says the funding didn’t hit the mark they had aimed for, which would have allowed them to travel to Hong Kong and access the archives, in addition to licensing archival materials and visuals. “But we were still able to get the interviews that we needed,” adds Lasi.

The budget that the team had hoped to hit was close to $750,000, but “the budget we ended up with was a third of that,” says Muse.

One of the workarounds was to recreate visuals after observing patterns in the archival footage of Hurston and Eng’s cinematography, with most of the latter’s work now lost. That last fact is why the documentary poses the question to filmmakers like Holness, Wilkinson and Podemski about what they’re doing to preserve their work, says Lasi.

Filming for the doc took place in Toronto, Rama First Nation, Ottawa, New York City and Los Angeles, starting in 2023 and wrapped earlier this year. Up next is a planned run on the festival circuit, where they will seek U.S. broadcast partners, as well distribution deals for a theatrical release in Canada.

Image courtesy of Pelee Entertainment/Creatorland