John Pozer

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John Pozer is an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include directing, writing, producing and editing. He has had two independent features selected to the Cannes International Film Festival and directed a slate of episodic television, both live action and animation.

[edit] Biography

Pozer began his career in the 1960's as a stage actor, touring in musical theatre productions such as Camelot, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and starring in the title roles of Oliver and Peter Pan. He went on to star as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, which opened the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. In 1970, Pozer was presented with the E.V. Young Memorial Award for Most Promising Actor.

Born in Kamloops, British Columbia, Pozer studied filmmaking and creative writing at the University of British Columbia and graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in Cinema from Concordia University in Montreal. He received the UBC Film Society Award for his series of documentaries which profiled university life in the 1980's.

[edit] Filmography

His first feature, The Grocer's Wife, which he wrote, directed, and produced, garnered seven international awards at festivals around the world. In 1992, it was selected to open the Critic's Week at the Cannes Film Festival, and went on to win the critics' award, the Prix Georges Sadoul, for Best First Film. In Canada, Pozer was awarded the inaugural Claude Jutra Award for Best Direction of a First Feature Film at the 1993 Genie Awards.

He next directed The Michelle Apartments, an offbeat comic tour-de-force which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was theatrically distributed by Cineplex Odeon.

Pozer also executive produced and edited the independent feature Kissed, which was selected for the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 1997. The film earned eight Genie nominations and went on to critical and box-office success.

He has directed episodic television such as Disney's So Weird, CTV's Cold Squad, CBC's These Arms of Mine, Global’s Blackfly, Fox Family's computer-animated Beast Wars, and MTV's 2ge+her. Pozer received a Leo Award for Best Director in May 2002 for his work on the MTV comedy series Sausage Factory.

[edit] Current Projects

Most recently, with Telefilm support, Pozer developed a slate of feature screenplays. These include Skin, screenplay by Pozer and based on the novel by Bonnie Bowman, Toast, screenplay by Pozer and Grant Buday, and based on Buday’s novel White Lung, Screaming Room, written by Robert Pratt and Paul Tartaglio and Pozer, and the recently filmed Mount Pleasant, written and directed by Ross Weber, and produced under the Mount Pleasant Productions banner.