Niobe Thompson

Niobe Thompson is a Canadian anthropologist and documentary film maker.[1] Since co-founding Clearwater Documentary in 2008, Thompson has produced and hosted one-off and series documentaries in partnership with CBC's science-and-nature program The Nature of Things.[2] He has twice won Canadian Screen Awards for "Best Science and Nature" (Code Breakers, 2011 & The Great Human Odyssey, 2015), his films have won 17 Alberta Film Awards, and he is a two-time winner of the Edmonton Film Prize.

Thompson studied Russian at the University of Alberta and McGill University before completing a masters at London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.[1] For his PhD at Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute he lived in Russia's remote Chukotka region, following the impact of Roman Abramovich's hypermodernization program in the early 2000s.[3] Four of his documentaries were partly filmed with indigenous people in Chukotka.

For the feature documentary Tipping Point: Age of the Oil Sands (2011),[4] Thompson featured Dene Elder Francois Paulette and director James Cameron. Code Breakers (2011),[5] about the peopling of the Americas, features the renowned geneticist Eske Willerslev. For The Perfect Runner (2012), Thompson attempted the 125-km Canadian Death Race and featured the ultrarunner Diane Van Deren.

For the three-part series on human origins, The Great Human Odyssey (2015), Thompson followed the emergence of modern humans in Africa and our subsequent settlement of the planet.[6][7][8] Over 18 months of shooting, the crew worked in 17 countries on 5 continents, filming with the Badjao of the Philippines, the San Bushmen of the Namibian Kalahari, Chukchi nomads in Arctic Russia, and the Crocodile People of Papua New Guinea.[9] In 2016, working with film composer Darren Fung, Thompson produced an live orchestral performance of Great Human Odyssey for the stage,[10] which premiered with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.

In 2016, Thompson directed two related documentaries on organ transplant medicine, in collaboration with ID:Productions and the National Film Board of Canada. The feature-length Memento Mori and the one-hour Vital Bonds are based on exceptional access to one of Canada's busiest organ transplant hospitals, and feature sequences with a family losing their son to a fentanyl poisoning and making the decision to donate his organs.[11] Vital Bonds debuted on CBC's The Nature of Things in November 2016.

Thompson was raised partly in the northern Alberta Cree community of Wabasca-Desmarais, where his father Jamie Thompson made wood-canvas canoes. His mother Sharon Poetker Thompson is a landscape painter. Thompson described his ambition in film making, stating "I want my children to grow up in a scientifically literate society, where films that explore the natural world play a central role"[12]

Thompson credits conservationist David Suzuki and veteran Canadian filmmaker Tom Radford[13] for his introduction to film. He also works closely with the Canadian verité specialist Rosie Dransfeld.[14]

References

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