Geographies of Solitude wins Best Canadian Feature Documentary!

Geographies of Solitude film won the Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award at Hot Docs in Toronto May 2022 for its experimental portrait of researcher Zoe Lucas and her work on Sable Island.

The Telefilm supported experimental documentary film is directed by Jacquelyn Mills    and produced by Mills and Rosalie Chicoine Perreault. The award   includes a cash prize of $10,000, sponsored by Telefilm and the  Documentary Organization of Canada.

    Hot Docs Winner " Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award
    Hot Docs Winner " The Earl A. Glick Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award

Geographies of Solitude is a film about an environmentalist (Zoe Lucas) living on Nova Scotia's Sable Island has won top Canadian honours at this year's Hot Docs Film Festival 2022 .

Her Sable Island film,  "Geographies of Solitude," chronicles the life's work of  environmentalist Zoe Lucas, the only full-time inhabitant on Sable  Island.

Visual and Aural Storytelling Documentary Film

This Sundance Canada film is directed by Jacquelyn Mills and produced by  Mills and Rosalie Chicoine Perreault. The award includes a cash prize of  $10,000, sponsored by Telefilm and the Documentary Organization of  Canada.

The jury praised this experimental documentary film  Geographies of Solitude for  “its deft ability to reveal the complex intersections between the  natural world and humanity’s excesses on a singular isolated island  through strongly crafted and arresting visual and aural storytelling.”

Mills also won the Earl A. Glick Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award,  which honours an artist presenting their first or second feature at the  festival. The award carries a cash prize of $3,000, sponsored by the  Glick family.
Geographies of Solitude Trailer.

The trailer for "Geographies of Solitude "  by Jacquelyn Mills, starring Zoe Lucas.

About the film: For decades,  Zoe Lucas has catalogued the flora and fauna on Sable Island, a thin  strip of land off the Canadian coast. Jacquelyn Mills is the Canadian Experimental Filmmaker for Geographies of Solitude.

Watch the Geographies of Solitude trailer on Vimeo!

Sable Island Film

Sable Island, which is about 300 kilometres off Nova Scotia’s coastline, is an ecological marvel. As seen in the film, it’s a land of rare beauty and mystery, marked by rolling hills, sand dunes and verdant plant life. It’s long and thin, more of a sandbar than an island, only 2km wide at its largest over a 40km length. Set in the North Atlantic Ocean, a tough spot to inhabit, it has an extremely variable climate, which shifts from frigid to sweltering over a twelve-month period, with its best days being in July and August.

Mixing vivid 16mm footage with hand-processed abstractions, Jacquelyn Mills’s film, a multiple prizewinner at the recent Berlinale, is a portrait of conservationist Zoe Lucas, one of the lone inhabitants of Sable Island, a 26-mile sandbar off the coast of Nova Scotia.

An account of Lucas’s remarkable study of the island’s biodiversity, its fabled herds of wild horses, and the many ecological threats it faces, Geographies of Solitude is also a sensuous collaboration between filmmaker, subject, and the sparse, windswept terrain.

Jacquelyn Mills Filmmaker

Jacquelyn Mills (b. 1984, Canada), an award-winning filmmaker based in Montréal, has worked as editor, sound designer and cinematographer for the National Film Board of Canada as well as other internationally acclaimed films. Her works are immersive and sensorial, often exploring an intimate and lyrical connection to the natural world. Her film In the Waves (2017) premiered at Visions du Réel.