Kevin McMahon (filmmaker)

Kevin McMahon is a Canadian documentary writer, director and producer. He is a founding partner at Primitive Entertainment, a Toronto production company specializing in documentary film, television and interactive media.

Early career[edit]

McMahon began his career as a newspaper journalist at the St. Catharines Standard.^[1] There, he was awarded a top prize from the Canadian Centre for Investigative Journalism and a nomination for a Governor General's Award for public service journalism.^[2][3] In 1985 he shifted his focus to documentary film, and is now regarded as one of Canada's most innovative directors.^[4] Of his first feature documentary, The Falls, the late Jay Scott wrote: “the film intermarries the naturally sacred and the unnaturally profane with breathtaking dexterity”. Over the next 25 years, the contrasting of sacred and profane, serious and comic, beautiful imagery and raw documentary became the hallmark of McMahon's non-fiction style.

Education[edit]

McMahon has degrees from Brock University and Carleton University and a Certificate In Radio, Television And Film from the University of Bristol in England.^[5]

Career[edit]

McMahon's work focuses on environmental themes, specifically subjects like Arctic climate change, toxins in Niagara Falls,^[6] the collapse of the cod fishery, the scourge of nuclear weapons, and stories about the guru Marshall McLuhan, Haida and Inuit communities, or the nature of human intelligence. He has filmed worldwide in places such as the Sahara, the deserts of Jordan and Iran, the north Atlantic, Galapagos Islands, Canada's maritime coasts, the Boreal forest, the Ecuadorian jungle and the high Arctic. McMahon has collaborated with the late rock musician Gord Downie on the film Waterlife,^[7][8] cellist Yo-Yo Ma,^[9] actress Sarah Polley,^[10] comedian Mary Walsh (actress)^[10] and astronaut Roberta Bondar.^[11]

McMahon's most recent work as a director is Borealis^[12], a feature documentary about the boreal forest, selected for Hot Docs 2020.^[13][14][15] He was also the writer, co-director and producer behind the 12-hour series Equator: A New World View, about climate change in the tropics^[16] and, as producer and writer, helped shape the international current affairs documentary In Search of a Perfect World, about the global quest for human rights.^[17] He directed the feature documentary Spaceship Earth, an international coproduction which was a Special Presentation at Hot Docs in 2016.^[18] McMahon previously directed more than 20 documentaries and produced hundreds of hours of non-fiction television, including the 10-hour series The Polar Sea, Canada's first long-form documentary series.^[19] The project, about climate change in the Arctic, included the companion Polar Sea 360, the world's first full-length Virtual Reality documentary. The project, to quote The Toronto Star, “instantly stands as one of the landmarks in the long and rich history of Canadian documentary filmmaking."^[20]

As a producer, some of McMahon's TV work includes: Working Over Time, a four-hour history of the nation's manual labourers;^[21] Canadian Made, a 14-part series about technological inventions; An Idea of Canada, chronicling a Vice Royal visit to tiny aboriginal communities; and The National Parks Project, a 26-part television, music and film series, that McMahon co-produced and co-directed, contributing the short film Standing Wave, featuring Shad (rapper), shot on the Nahanni River.

McMahon has written for POV Magazine,^[22] Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, HuffPost and CBC Radio’s Ideas.^[23] He is the author of Arctic Twilight^[24], about the impact of the Cold War on the Inuit. Most recently he wrote several articles arguing for the recognition of documentary as Canada’s only non-aboriginal indigenous art form.

As a story editor, McMahon helped shape Alan Zweig’s feature documentaries Coppers (film), There Is a House Here, A Hard Name, Lovable and I, Curmudgeon; Jay Cheel’s Beauty Day and How To Build A Time Machine and Nicholas de Pencier’s Four Wings and a Prayer. McMahon is a frequent guest in film classes and works with younger filmmakers, both informally and through cultural institutions. He has been a mentor in programs run by Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the Ontario Media Development Corporation and the Documentary Organization of Canada. Most recently McMahon worked with the Canadian Film Centre/National Film Board of Canada as the mentor on Sarah Polley’s debut documentary, Stories We Tell.

Awards[edit]

Among his awards as director, writer or producer, McMahon is the recipient of several Canadian Screen Awards, a Webby Award, an Interactive award from the South by Southwest Festival, the Earth Prize from the Tokyo International Film Festival,^[25] a Special Jury Prize from Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival,^[26] and the designation of Canadian Eco Hero by the Planet in Focus’ film festival.^[27] The Canadian Film Institute and Hot Docs have both held retrospectives of his work.

Filmography[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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