DOC Institute Honours Awards In Conversation with
Zoe Dirse csc By Oyin Olalekan
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n December 2018, Zoe Dirse csc was honoured with the DOC Institute’s Rogers-DOC Luminary Award, which recognizes industry leaders who inspire upand-coming filmmakers. Award winners were chosen by a jury of documentary filmmakers and producers from across the country. In the lead-up to celebrating the sixth edition of the DOC Institute Honours, the institute profiled the 2018 recipients, including Dirse in an interview shared with Canadian Cinematographer. DOC INSTITUTE (DI): Considering that you have had such an expansive career, I was very curious about what keeps you going. Have you seen anything recently that inspired you or made you think, “Right, this is why I do what I do”? ZOE DIRSE (ZD): I can say with true honesty that I’ve been watching some television series that are really quite amazing. In terms of being a cinematographer, I’ve enjoyed Big Little Lies – the first season was directed by Jean-Marc Vallée from Quebec and shot by Yves Bélanger [csc], a terrific director of photography from Montreal. Most of the crew were all French Canadian, and I was watching it thinking, this doesn’t even feel like a series. It feels like a whole feature film. It’s so well crafted and so well put together. That was really lovely to watch and feel really proud to see people that I knew and worked with. I’m very active right now with the Canadian Society of Cinematographers – I’m on the Board of Directors– and it was my mission when I first became
20 • Canadian Cinematographer - November 2019
a full member to get more women and directors of photography from Quebec. And it makes me happy to see that it’s happened! There are some terrific women that are now full members that I knew and worked with when they were starting out. DI: It’s great that you’ve been able to see this shift yourself. How else have you seen the industry change throughout the years? ZD: Well, when I started out there were hardly any women in the industry and I thought, well, what’s wrong with this picture? I was in my 20s and I had finished my degrees at U of T in psychology and education and had studied second wave feminism. There were a few professors who were very influential for me; especially Kay Armatage who I had the privilege of working with on some of her early, early stuff just as a volunteer. And I
realized that I would love to be a cinematographer! I loved taking photos and I thought it was such a lovely creative process because I was so enamored with cinema. But then I started looking around and realized, wait a minute, they’re all guys! But I wasn’t turned off by it, it just felt odd. It just didn’t make any sense. In my teaching career too I noticed that a lot of the students would want to be either directors or cinematographers and it was interesting to see that most of the students that wanted to be cinematographers were male. That’s still fairly the case. But I think what’s key is role-modelling – that they see that there are women that do it, have done it, and can talk from experience to the students about that reality. DI: You’ve spoken a bit about the collaborative nature of working in film and meeting the right people along the
