Playback is pleased to introduce the 2024 cohort for our annual 10 to Watch. This year, the talented and enterprising group were selected from more than 250 submissions.

Keep an eye out during September and October for individual profiles offering an inside look on their career trajectories.

Content executive Adam Garnet Jones

Adam Garnet Jones (he/him) is Cree-Métis from Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). After more than a decade as a film and TV writer-director-producer, he shifted to content development and advocacy for Indigenous creators, founding the role of Indigenous initiatives lead at Telefilm Canada and the Canada Media Fund (CMF).

In 2021, Jones joined APTN as director of TV content and special events. Within that role he has set the direction of the network’s programming, and helped to nurture Indigenous TV series and feature films. His work includes the award-winning limited series Little Bird with Crave, the feature film and limited series Bones of Crows with CBC and the live national broadcast commemorating the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Writer Cheryl Meyer

Cheryl Meyer is a screenwriter for film and TV. She has worked on several family dramas, including Amazon’s Beyond Black Beauty. Her YA series Normal Girls and Zero Repeat Forever have both received CMF development funding. Her original TV pilot Chronic Elle has been selected for the 2024 Athena Film Festival’s Episodic Writers Lab.

Her monster horror flick Carved will premiere on Hulu in time for Halloween, while her dramatic thriller feature All the Lost Ones, starring Jasmine Mathews and Devon Sawa, has been acquired by Paramount+ Canada for 2024. Her indie crime thriller The Last Mark ran at the Canadian Film Festival before landing on Super Channel.

Meyer is also an advocate for the community of creatives with disabilities as an early advisor for the Disability Screen Office, a community advisor for ReelAbilities Accessible Writers Lab and a speaker on accessibility at the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) 23rd Top Ten Industry Forum. She is repped by Conrad Sun at Sundust Management.

Showrunner-director Dinae Robinson

Dinae Robinson is a Anishinaabekwe (Ojibway) writer, director, creative producer and showrunner born and raised in Winnipeg, and is a registered member of Swan Lake First Nation in Treaty One Territory. Robinson started out as an actor, appearing in films and the APTN lumi comedy series DJ Burnt Bannock. She is an alumna of the National Screen Institute’s CBC New Indigenous Voices program, and credits this experience for influencing her move into the creative development side of film.

Robinson is a co-showrunner, writer, director and executive producer on the fifth season of APTN’s Taken. She was co-showrunner, writer and director for Snapchat’s first Canadian original series Reclaim(ed), which received a Rockie Award nomination. She was also co-showrunner and a writer, director and executive producer for all three seasons of APTN’s 7th Gen, which shares stories of young Indigenous leaders across the country and will air its third season in 2025. She also directed the complementary Cree language learning web series.

In 2022, Robinson directed, co-wrote and executive produced the feature documentary True Story, and will soon direct her first narrative feature, Have You Heard?, an Indigenous anthology horror film supported by Telefilm.

Producer-actor Emmanuel Kabongo

Emmanuel Kabongo is an actor and producer hailing from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He found his passion for the arts after his family sought refuge in Canada from civil unrest. His acting journey began with short films and student productions, eventually propelling him to a lead guest star role on Breakout. Since then, he has appeared in series such as Outer Banks, Star Trek: Discovery and NCIS: Hawai’i, and films like Antibirth, Wedding Disaster, Simulant, Run This Town and Pompeii.

He more recently took on the role of producer, including the web series Teenagers and the feature film Sway (in which he also stars), which is currently in the festival circuit. He is in post-production on another film he associate-produced, Welcome. Kabongo is repped by Angie Edgar at Alchemy Entertainment and Amanda Rosenthal of the Amanda Rosenthal Talent Agency.

Director Gillian McKercher

Gillian McKercher is a Canadian writer, director, producer and co-founder of Kino Sum Productions. McKercher’s first feature film as writer-director, Circle of Steel, won an Audience Award at the 2018 Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF).

She developed her sophomore feature film, Lucky Star, while she was a director resident at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC), with the additional support of the CFC/Netflix Project Development Accelerator and the Harold Greenberg Fund. The film will make its world premiere as the closing film of CIFF. McKercher wrote, directed and appeared in Orphaned, a documentary on oil well cleanup, which is streaming on CBC Gem.

Through Kino Sum, she has produced numerous short films, music videos and documentaries for other filmmakers, premiering at festivals such as Fantastic Fest, the Vancouver International Film Festival and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

Head of development Jay Carolyn Wu

Jay Carolyn Wu is a creative producer and writer-director who currently serves as head of development at Toronto-based prodco LaRue Entertainment. From 2021 to 2023, they worked as a development executive at Bell Media, where they developed scripted series for CTV and Crave, including Sullivan’s Crossing.

Wu’s short films have played in film festivals domestically and around the world. Their most recent short film Toe the Line (2021) was nominated for a Golden Sheaf for Scripted Short at the 2022 Yorkton Film Festival and screened at festivals such as Inside Out Toronto, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and the Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF). Their upcoming feature Yo, We’re Dying was selected for Telefilm’s Talent to Watch in 2023.

A frequent facilitator, educator, public speaker, mentor and advocate for 2SLGBTQ & BIPOC storytellers, Wu co-founded and co-ran Colour Theory, a non-industry event exclusively for 2SQTBIPOC filmmakers that ran from 2017 to 2020. They spearheaded the inaugural all-BIPOC cohort of the CFC Primetime TV Program in 2023 and the VAFF Series Development Program in 2021-22. In 2021, they developed and co-ran In My Toolkit, a free virtual workshop series for 2SQTBIPOC that covered everything from writing/directing to production design and locations.

Composer Kalaisan Kalaichelvan

Kalaisan Kalaichelvan is an accomplished composer who was a Sundance Composers Lab Fellow, a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity resident and is a Slaight/CFC Music Residency alumnus and artist-in-residence at the TMU Creative School.

Named by arts and culture publication Ludwig Van as one of “six Canadian composers to keep an eye on,” his music has been performed and premiered by ensembles such as Pro Coro Canada, Dior Quartet, New Music Concerts Ensemble and Extended Music Collective. Recent film composition credits include This Place, which premiered at TIFF in 2022, and In Flames, which premiered at Cannes Director’s Fortnight and was Pakistan’s official Academy Awards entry for Best International Film.

He scored Shook, which will premiere at TIFF this year and is currently scoring the Simon Barry series Bet, produced by Boat Rocker for Netflix.

Producer Mike Johnston

Mike Johnston is a producer and co-founder of the Vancouver-based indie production company Studio 104 Entertainment. He co-produced I’m Just Here For the Riot, an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and served as an associate producer for the Crave doc The Grizzly Truth. He participated in the 2019 Documentary Lab and 2021 Producer’s Lab at the Whistler Film Festival. In 2023, he represented Canada at the European Film Market as a delegate for Telefilm’s Canada Producers Without Borders program.

Johnston’s recent producing work includes the 2023 film Wild Goat Surf, financed by Telefilm and Bell Media and released theatrically by Vortex Media in 2024, and Curl Power, a Telus originals documentary which will be released theatrically by Sherry Media Group in the fall.

Johnston is currently in early pre-production on Memoria, financed by Telefilm, Crave, CBC Films and Creative BC. The English-Spanish feature is set to shoot in Colombia and Canada in 2025.

Director Shawn Gerrard

After ten years as a post-production supervisor and post-production producer, Shawn Gerrard transitioned to directing episodic television in 2021 with credits on Take Note and The Next Step in 2022 and Jane and Dino Dex in 2024.

Gerrard is an alumnus of York University’s film production and screenwriting program, TIFF’s Filmmaker Lab, the Banff World Media Festival’s Diversity of Voices program and the WBD Access x Canadian Academy Directors Program. He has directed a number of short films and one feature film, Space & Time (2020). His films have screened at festivals such as TIFF, Reelworld and the Austin Film Festival, and have been broadcast on CBC and Hollywood Suite.

Writer-comedian Vance Banzo

Vance Banzo is a Saulteaux/Cree writer, actor and comedian, born and raised in Edmonton. He was a co-creator and star of the award-winning CBC sketch comedy series Tallboyz, and was a contributing director in the third season. As a comedian he has performed on many stages across the country, including Just For Laughs Toronto and the Gchi Dewin Indigenous Storytellers Festival.

Banzo worked as a story editor on the CBC sitcom Run the Burbs and is credited as a writer on the CTV comedy series Acting Good. He is a co-creator and executive producer on the upcoming CBC comedy Snotty Nose Rez Kids.