Laura Rietveld

Lau­ra Rietveld is an emerg­ing doc­u­men­tary writer, film­mak­er and win­ner of the Con­seil des arts et des let­tres du Québec — Work by an Emerg­ing Artist Award in Mon­tre­al (2015). In 2010, exas­per­at­ed by the lack of diverse and mean­ing­ful sto­ries told by the main­stream media, Lau­ra resigned from a career in main­stream media. Bound by themes of iden­ti­ty, fam­i­ly and the human-nature con­nec­tion, Lau­ra’s work has been pub­lished in Eng­lish, Inuk­ti­tut and French. Her first doc­u­men­tary, Okpik’s Dream (2015) won the Rigob­er­ta Menchú Grand Prize at the Mon­tre­al’s First Peo­ples Fes­ti­val, an hon­or­able men­tion for the Grand Prize at the Inns­bruck Inter­na­tion­al Nature Fes­ti­val in Aus­tria, and was nom­i­nat­ed for best doc­u­men­tary pro­gram at the Cana­di­an Screen Awards. Her first music video, Broke Down Ski’­Tu­uq, was nom­i­nat­ed for best music video at the Native Amer­i­can Music Awards (2018). Her most recent fea­ture doc­u­men­tary, The Fam­i­ly of the For­est (2022), select­ed for First Pitch at the RIDM Forum (2018) and worked in a work­shop with Sun­dance Col­lab (2021), was near­ly sev­en years in the mak­ing. Lau­ra holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Busi­ness and a BA in His­to­ry from Queen’s Uni­ver­si­ty, both Ontario insti­tu­tions. She lives in rur­al Que­bec with her young fam­i­ly and chick­ens, sur­round­ed by the nature that nur­tures her.