Velcrow Ripper
February 18, 2009
Multiple award-winning documentaryfilmmaker, writer and sound designer, Velcrow Ripper garnered international attention with his feature-length doc ScaredSacred that won the 2005 Best Documentary Genie Award (the Canadian Academy Awards) as well as a Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, and selected as one of Canada’s Top Ten films of 2004.
In his more than thirty films, he has explored some of the most important issues of our time. His films include; Iran the Crisis, In the Company of Fear, a documentary on non-violent resistance to the ‘dirty war’ in Colombia; the Golden Gate Award winning doc Open Season,about bear hunters and the activists who protest the hunt; and the multiple award-winning feature documentary, Bones of the Forest examining the struggle to save the ancient forests of British Columbia (winner of the 1996 Best of the Festival Award- Hot Docs Festival, 1996 Genie award for Best Feature Doc).
In sound design, he has garnered awards on the feature docs The Corporation, and A Place Called Chiapas, and was the sound designer on the multiple award-winning feature film Eve and the Fire Horse that won a Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
Ripper is a graduate of Concordia University, and was a co-founder of the Gulf Island Film and Television School (GIFTS). He was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and has serves as an instructor at the prestigious Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, as well as the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
He lives and works on Toronto Island.
Website for FIERCE LIGHT: When the Spirit Meets Action
Press kit for FIERCE LIGHT: When the Spirit Meets Action