Director Nisha Pahuja’s 2022 Hindi-language documentary To Kill a Tiger (Notice Pictures, National Film Board of Canada) is at the centre of a global gender justice campaign called #StandWithHer.

The campaign, produced by Toronto-based Notice, is being conducted in collaboration with assorted NGOs including Equality Now, Equimundo and MenEngage Alliance. It will start with a 40-city U.S. tour featuring screenings of the film, followed by conversations between the Toronto-based Pahuja, the film’s participants, gender rights activists, legal and political experts and executive producers.

More than 75 international screenings are planned in September.

The documentary follows a family from a small Indian village seeking justice against all odds after their 13-year-old daughter is sexually assaulted by three men.

The film won the 2022 Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated in the best documentary feature categories at the 2024 Oscars and Peabody Awards. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Dev Patel and Mindy Kaling are among the film’s executive producers.

“For the past few years, my team and I have been working tirelessly toward this moment, supported by partners, organizations and thinkers who’ve been at the forefront of gender rights for decades,” said Pahuja in a statement.

In addition, BlueShift Education and Sausalito, Calif.-based doc distributor Roco Films are creating a curriculum inspired by the film. According to a release, the plan is for the curriculum to reach 1.2 million students in 25,000 to 50,000 schools across the U.S. in two years.

Norbert Abrams retires from NCA

Norbert Abrams, a longtime talent manager and partner at Toronto-based agency Noble Caplan Abrams (NCA), is set to retire at the end of the month.

Effective tomorrow (Feb. 28), Abrams will retire after 28 years with the agency. His clients have included Drake, Simu Liu, Stephan James, Nina Dobrev, Charles Vandervaart, Amber Marshall and Jahmil French, among others.

In September 2024, NCA promoted Sav Murthy and Rick Gerrits to co-manage a new talent roster in the film and television department. Murthy will now be taking over Abrams’ talent roster, Gerrits told Playback Daily.

“He was instrumental in creating a system that valued the long-term artistic and professional growth of child actors, ensuring they transitioned into sustainable, fulfilling careers,” said the agency in a statement. “His work changed the trajectory of talent representation of young talent, setting new standards for professionalism, ethics and mentorship.”

Racial Equity Screen Office receives $142K in funding

The Racial Equity Screen Office (RESO), a Vancouver-headquartered national office designed to support mentiorship, training, production and distribution of content by racialized Canadians, is receiving a total of $142,000 in funding from the Canadian government.

The first part of the funding for the Vancouver-headquartered national office, totaling $42,000 via Creative Export Canada’s export development stream, was announced by Vancouver Granville MP Taleeb Noormohamed on Monday (Feb. 24). The funds will be halved – $21,000 each – for fiscal 2024-25 and 2025-26.

The funding will go to RESO’s IP Across Continents Accelerator project. The project aims to aid racialized, independent Canadian producers in finding buyers for their audiovisual IP. The initiative includes market participation for curated delegations as well as meetings with sales and distribution agents. As part of the accelerator, 30 Canadian producers with export-ready projects will be invited to meet with buyers at the East by Northwest Global Creative Summit in July in Vancouver.

RESO will also receive $100,000 through the Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Program’s organizational capacity building component. These funds will go toward another project – Building Strength, Sustainability and Capacity from the Inside Out: Long-term Equity and Anti-Racism Guardrails in Canada’s Screen Industry. The initiative aims to improve RESO’s governance practices, financial management, human resources, partnerships, networking and strategic planning.

Image courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada