Deborah Parks
Filmography
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BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell/ Deborah Parks
On December 10, 2007, a 16-year-old Toronto schoolgirl, Aqsa, was strangled to death; her father and brother are charged with murder. Three weeks later, teenage sisters were shot to death in Dallas; their father is wanted for murder. Six months later, a 19-year-old college student was stabbed by her brother; he was convicted and is now in jail in New York.
Friends and family of the murdered girls paint a chilling portrait of the forces that led to their deaths, and Toronto schoolgirls talk about their lives of constant fear. While Muslim women organize to help girls at risk and the imam at a Toronto mosque teaches that violence has no basis in Islam, some men continue to justify these crimes through patriarchal beliefs about family honour. Award-winning director Shelley Saywell brings her consummate documentary skills and passion for human rights to challenge the traditions that lie behind the heartbreaking tragedies committed against young girls caught between two cultures in North America.
BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
A new feature documentary – Lowdown Tracks had its world premiere at Hot Docs International Festival in Toronto on April 25, 2015. This has been a long journey as we conceived making this film eight years ago. It all started when Shelley Saywell went to a benefit concert that her friend Lorraine Segato (Parachute Club fame) was putting on for the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. Lorraine did something amazing that night – Parachute Club was the house band but the headliners were homeless musicians, street poets, and dancers whom she’d discovered with the help of organizations like SKETCH in Toronto. It was a magical night, and Shelley kept wondering about the stories behind the songs. Who were these talented people, and how did they end up on the street?
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International
Premiere 2011!
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RUNNING GUNS (DEVIL'S BARGAIN)
BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS Narrated by: Kiefer Sutherland
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
World Premiere at IDFA (International Documentary Film Amsterdam)
Small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction, killing more than half a million people a year, spreading like a disease and destablizing entire regions. Beginning in the gun markets of Somalia, we witness their horrific impact. But no guns are made in Somalia.
From France to South Africa, Bosnia, Moldova, the United States and Canada, Devil’s Bargain examines the ways in which guns slip from legal to illicit markets. From dealers, to pilots, to end-users, to the victims, we discover a largely unregulated trade in what has become the globalization of death.
When 200,000 AK-47s go missing from Bosnia, activists call for an International Treaty to curb the trade. But it’s blocked by the super power, and loopholes “big enough for an Antonov to fly through” continue to allow the flow of guns that destabilize our world…
World Premiere 2009!
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DUNDAS PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Mary Anne Alton / Deborah Parks
The 40 Year Secret" examines a very dark period of Canada’s social history. The 1960s are remembered as being a very liberating time, but it wasn’t so for everybody. Almost everyone knows of a girl who “went away” and then returned, no questions asked. The secrecy of the time period was meant to protect the social status of middle-class parents and keep the illusion that “nice girls don’t have premarital sex”. The reality was that lots of young people were having unprotected sex and many were getting pregnant. There was a sexual revolution taking place.
Pregnant teenaged girls were considered by society to be tainted, something to be hidden away. Many of them lost their babies to adoption, and were told to pretend it never happened. For one couple, Linda and Ray, it was The 40 Year Secret. Find out what happens when they tell their secret in a very public way. And follow them as they rekindle a high school romance and search for their daughter.
JOHN KASTNER PRODUCTIONS / NFB
PRODUCERS: John Kastner/Deborah Parks / Silva Basmajian (NFB)
This is the Jenkins family, sharing a family moment during a prison visit with their son. Mason Jenkins is serving a life sentence for murdering his sister Jennifer. Ten years ago, when he was 20, Mason allegedly killed his 18-year-old sister with repeated rifle shots to her head and heart. His parents Brian and Leslie (who found the battered and bleeding body of their daughter in their basement) have not only steadfastly stood by him, but hope that he will one day make parole and come home to live together with them.
With astonishing access to footage of the entire family over a ten year period the film follows their unfolding relationship on its dark journey, starting from minutes after the murder to the present day. Mason continues to insist he is innocent and his parents have stood by him despite what appears to be overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Then, in an astonishing twist, the film reveals who really killed Jennifer Jenkins: the killer confesses to the murder on camera.
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JOHN KASTNER PRODUCTIONS / NFB
PRODUCERS: John Kastner/Deborah Parks / Silva Basmajian (NFB)
What happens to people who suffer from mental illnesses and commit violent crimes? Some are sent to forensic psychiatric hospitals - once called asylums for the criminally insane - where they disappear from public view for years. Emmy award-winning filmmaker John Kastner gained unprecedented access to one such facility, the Brockville Mental Health Centre. He follows the treatment of patients struggling to gain control over their lives, so they can return to a society that often fears and demonizes them.
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'NCR' NOT CRIMINALLY RESPONSIBLE
JOHN KASTNER PRODUCTIONS / NFB
PRODUCERS: John Kastner/Deborah Parks / Silva Basmajian (NFB)
Sean Clifton savagely attacked a complete stranger in a psychotic frenzy and tried to stab her to death in front of scores of witnesses, because “the devil told him to stab the prettiest girl in the mall.” Now he is out. His victim is terrified he will come after her. With unprecedented access to Clifton, the victim and the mental institution, the film follows Clifton through an extraordinary treatment process and back onto the streets -- only to find his victim’s family waiting for him, battling to keep him under the hospitals’ control.
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BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
This one-hour journalistic exploration by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Shelley Saywell takes the viewer beyond the headlines and into the daunting, determined minds and hearts of Hamas, a movement formed in 1987 with one declared aim – to destroy the hard-won New State of Israel through Jihad: through applied resistance to Israel’s occupation of what Palestinians perceived – and perceive – as their ancestral land.
In Saywell’s Behind the Mask there are no clearly identifiable monsters: only competing claimants to a harshly, passionately contested strip of land. Viewers may find themselves shedding tears for all those claimants, here: both hopeful Jewish Israelis who have seen those hopes of peace and security in the promised land dashed, and Palestinians who feel marginalized, disenfranchised and betrayed.
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BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
Martyr Street, Hebron is the only place in the West Bank where Jewish settlers live in the heart of a Palestinian city; it has long been known as a flashpoint. In September 2000 our film crew was in the midst of shooting a story on children living there for the documentary, A Child’s Century of War. We had no idea that the intifadah was about to break out – literally – before our eyes.
The resulting film Martyr Street explores the roots of violence on the street named for its dead. We feature the children as they grow older, but this time include the adults in their lives; the soldiers, the teachers, the fanatics and the fatalists – each claiming huge stakes that are both incompatible and impassioned. But it goes back even further, to the story of Abraham, the patriarch of both the Muslims and Jews, who is buried there. Out of a shared heritage, death seems, at first , their only common ground. Does it have to be?
This is the story of Martyr Street.
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BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
This is a story of teenage girls living in Toronto’s inner core, raised in shelters and housing projects. These girls feel so isolated and disconnected that joining a clique or gang becomes the only way to belong. For them violence is empowerment. The films looks at the sources of their violence: racial tension, family problems and some programs that can help them cope and overcome their destructive behaviour.
BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
NARRATED BY: Christopher Plummer
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
At the beginning of the last century, nine out of ten people killed in war were soldiers. At the beginning of this century, nine out of ten people killed in war were civilians. Most of them are children. A Child’s Century of War is a feature length documentary that takes the viewer on a journey through war from the perspective of children. It is an examination of the way modern war has changed and increasingly victimizes children. Three contemporary wars are the heart of the film. Orphans of two Chechen wars, children growing up on the most dangerous street of the West Bank and children abducted by the rebel forces in Sierra Leone tell their stories. Dairies and voices of children from the past provide an eerie parallel of history.
SELECTED TO - ACADEMY'S SHORT
LIST OF 10 BEST DOCUMENTARY
FILMS
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DIRECTED BY: Written and directed by Shelley Saywell
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
Throughout the Islamic world, each year hundreds of women are shot, stabbed, strangled or burned to death by male relatives because they are thought to have “dishonoured” their families. They may have lost their virginity, refused an arranged marriage or left an abusive husband. Even if a woman is raped or merely the victim of gossip, she must pay the price. Crimes of Honour documents the terrible reality of femicide – the belief that a girl’s body is the property of the family, and any suggestion of sexual impropriety must be cleansed with her blood. We meet women in hiding from their families, a brother who describes his reasons for killing the sister he loved, and a handful of women who have committed themselves to the protection of young women in danger of losing their lives.
KIM'S STORY
BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
DIRECTED BY: Written and directed by Shelley Saywell
PRODUCER: Shelley Saywell
If there was a photograph that captured the horrific nature of the Vietnam War it was that of a nine-year-old girl running naked down a road, screaming in agony from napalm burns. In telling Kim’s story, Shelley Saywell makes poignant use of news footage of that time, when the dreadfully wounded little girl ran to journalists at the scene for help, help that was extended heroically. She interviewed the doctors and journalists who 25 years ago ensured Kim’s survival.
Saywell accompanies Kim Phuc on a remarkable odyssey to Washington’s Vietnam memorial Wall, as part of the U.S. Veterans Day ceremonies. There, dignitaries struggled to hold back the tears as Kim, still in their minds the little girl, made it clear that her mission was one of forgiveness and a wider healing.
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OUT OF THE FIRE
BISHARI FILM PRODUCTIONS
PRODUCERS: Shelley Saywell / Deborah Parks
Faye Schulman returns to her home town of Lenin; at the time, part of Poland, now in Belarus. It’s where Mrs. Schulman was living when Germany invaded and where, in 1942, she barely escaped death at the hands of the Nazis because of her talent with a camera. The Nazis felt they could make use of her skills.
Faye’s family were killed by the Nazis in a mass execution. Faye herself was imprisoned with the few other Jews who were spared in the local synagogue, but allowed out from time to time because there was a dark-room in the family home.
Ultimately she escaped – with her camera – and joined and fought with a group of Partisans in the nearby forests. She is now returning 55 years later to pray on-site for her lost family and to meet again her few surviving Partisan comrades.
