The Corporation

Jennifer Abbott is a Canadian filmmaker who has been experimenting with media as a form of intellectual and creative expression and activism for almost 25 years. Abbott is largely self-taught struggling over the course of 5 years to make her first feature documentary, A Cow at My Table. At the time and before she learned the pitfalls of hyperbole, she would often be heard saying that her film meant so much to her that when it was done, she’d feel her life had been worthwhile and could die. Happily she didn’t and went on to make several others. She is best known as the co-director with Mark Achbar and editor of The Corporation, an international hit in festivals, TV and theatres. It garnered 26 awards including the Sundance Audience Award and a Genie and has a 90% rating for both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. It is also credited as one of the top ten films to inspire the Occupy Movement.

Currently Abbott is in development with the National Film Board of Canada on a feature documentary The Air That Breaths Us about the psychology of climate change. She is also co-writing and editing Sea Blind, a film about the melting Arctic Ocean and the opening of the Northern Shipping Route slated to screen at the Paris Climate Talks, COP 21. Abbott is also finishing co-directing, co-writing and editing the feature documentary Us & Them about homelessness and addiction, slated for release in 2016. In 2013, Abbott made the experimental short Brave New Minds for Amsterdam’s Submarine Channel that premiered at DOK Leipzig and was nominated for Prix Europa. ln 2012, she began developing a documentary with the NFB but emerged having written the first draft of a feature screenplay titled Money and Other Love Stories. 2011 saw the release of I Am, which Abbott edited and executive produced. Her previous work includes the experimental short Skinned exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and editing several other indie-docs. She lives on a permaculture farm with her large blended family on a small Pacific Island on Canada’s west coast.

Source

Achbar is a graduate of Syracuse University’s Fine Arts Film Program. Achbar interned in Hollywood on the children’s TV programme Bill Daily’s Hocus Pocus Gang, followed by a three year stint in Toronto with Sunrise Films on their documentary series Spread your Wings and the CBC/Disney series Danger Bay. He then teamed up with director Robert Boyd, and received a Gemini nomination for Best Writer on The Canadian Conspiracy, a cultural/political satire for CBC and HBO’s Comedy Experiments which chronicled Canada’s secret takeover of the USA. It won a Gemini for Best Entertainment Special and was nominated for an International Emmy.
Achbar moved into independent media, working in many capacities on films, videos and books on issues ranging from nuclear lunacy, poverty, and East Timor, to the media, U.S. hegemony and corporate power.
With Peter Wintonick, Achbar co-directed and co-produced Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which was, until the release of The Corporation Canada’s all-time, top-grossing feature documentary. Achbar’s companion book to the film hit the national best-seller list in Canada.
Achbar collaborated with editor Jennifer Abbott to create Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage, a low-budget video diary by the couple known as Canada’s first legally married lesbians. This true story of “boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy becomes girl” received festival invitations from around the globe and was broadcast in Canada on Pridevision and the Knowledge Network.
In 1997, Achbar initiated a project titled The Corporation with author and University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan. Bakan wrote the film and book, while Achbar directed, produced and executive-produced the film. Jennifer Abbott joined the team as editor and co-director in 2000. The documentary compares globalized corporate psychology and practice to formal definitions of psychopathic behaviour, touching on environmental and social issues, as well as historical origins of corporate behaviour.