Film grad Brianna Russell completes residency at the Canadian Film Centre
Film graduate Brianna Russell completed her residency in the writer’s lab at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC)’s Norman Jewison Film Program (external link) .
Russell, who graduated from TMU in 2025, had submitted her application for the five-and-a-half month professional program in January last year. She said it was something she had been looking forward to for a long time.
“It's kind of the quintessential Canadian film thing to do,” Russell said.
She submitted the application for the writer’s lab with a feature script she had originally written when she was 15 or 16, and had been revising sinceThen, she was asked to interview for the program.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more sick in my life,” Russell said.
Russell said she was ready to apply for over-and-over again if her application wasn’t successful the first time — which was the scenario she prepared herself for. That’s when she got the email that she had gotten into the professional program of her dreams.
“I don't even know how to describe that feeling. I think I cried, and my hands were shaking. I just didn’t know how badly I wanted it until I had it,” she said.
The Norman Jewison Film Program offers four intensive labs for emerging to mid-level Canadian filmmakers: for directors, editors, producers and writers. It runs from July to December each year.
The program placed her in a cohort with other writers, who she said had similar “weird” tastes in filmmaking. A highlight of the program, Russell said, was getting to meet fellow Canadian writers, and learning from mentors who work in the industry whose names she’d been seeing in the credits on screen.
Another highlight for Russell came during TIFF.
“The CFC gave us all industry passes, which was really amazing and wonderful. And they just said, go see as many movies as you can,” Russell said. “‘You want to be a filmmaker, go watch a bunch of films.’ So that's what I did, and I had the best TIFF ever.”
Over the course of several months, Russell said the CFC’s writer’s lab did a great job of helping her hone her voice and style as an individual filmmaker. They also gave the filmmakers in each of the labs the opportunity to create something by the end of their term.
In the writer’s lab, Russell got to create a proof-of-concept for a scene in a film she’d been working on — in just an eight-hour shoot. Thanks to her directing experience during her time at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), she also got to direct the scene for her queer horror / psychological thriller script, in which a girl bashes her husband’s head with a baseball bat.
At the end of the residency, the CFC held a graduating showcase at TIFF Lightbox. Toronto’s film industry gathered to watch the shorts that the directors and producers created, as well as the proof-of-concept films the writers made. All of their work was edited by the students in the CFC’s editor’s lab.
“The showcase was so incredibly special, they made me believe that I had a career in the industry,” Russell said. “To get to watch all the films made by the other really talented people in my cohort was incredible…it was kind of the most perfect send-off to the whole CFC journey.”
Now, Russell is looking forward to what’s next: a summer full of theatre productions, and a web series she’s developing with fellow Film graduate, Dylan Duff.
To current Film students at TMU, Russell said to “think very deeply about what makes you unique as a filmmaker” and to follow that instinct to tell creative stories. She also encouraged students to take the risk and apply for the CFC’s program — even if it means applying over and over again.
“It gave me a whole new network of people,” Russell said. “I'm really appreciative of everything that the CFC did, and that TMU did as well, because TMU lays the groundwork for everything that happens after.”