Shira Newman is an emerging filmmaker from Winnipeg Manitoba recently having completed her first fully realized non-student work The Blessing. She has a degree in Film Studies and Religion from the University of Manitoba and studied Film Production at Concordia In Montreal. After returning to Winnipeg from Montreal at the birth of her son she began work on her own short films – often documenting her son’s babyhood, and the experience of motherhood (and the tension between art production as she’s been taught it and mothering) in film and video as well as creating an 8mm short film inspired by and accompanied by the music of The Bushtits. She also began developing the project The Blessing further exploring her questions about mothering in this dark horror through the Winnipeg Film Group First Film Fund.
Over the last 10 years, Newman has also thrown her hat in to support other local filmmakers –from production design to editing to script supervising on large and small productions (she loves, loves, loves building community and working with other artists). She has been working in the Manitoba film industry as an art director and more recently a script supervisor on such films as Borealis by Sean Garrity and Road of Iniquity by Mark Ennis and Shelagh Carter’s Into Invisible Light. Newman also teaches film-making and screenwriting to elementary age children through the Winnipeg School Division. Newman also has a history in drawing and painting and loves doing these things but is at her absolute happiest when working with actors and developing characters while keeping her mind on the art and aesthetics of film-making. She believes that film is a beautiful medium to explore human experience in a very authentic and vulnerable way, to touch the world with kindness and compassion and curiosity, to give experience and emotion colours and language and to truly touch hearts and connect people to one another and a little more deeply to themselves. She believes film can move well beyond pure entertainment and can be transformative – both socially and personally. It is her goal to always be working towards this goal.