Elle Flanders

Elle Flanders is a filmmaker and photographer based in Toronto and New York City. She was raised in Canada and Israel. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University, an MA in critical theory, and is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum. She was executive director of the Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival in Toronto. Flanders has been on the board of directors of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, and the Centre for Media and Culture in Education at the University of Toronto. She sits on the advisory committee of the Worldwide Short Film Festival, and the New Festival in New York. In 2001, she was the programmer and conference director of Persistent Vision, a conference to mark the 25th anniversary of Frameline – the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. At 18, she became a social activist and photographer and began to document the effects of the Israeli state on Palestinian lives. In 1989, she photographed women’s resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada and exhibited this work in North America in the exhibition Crossing Borders: Israel Palestine, A Photographer’s Peace Initiative. This first exhibition prompted Flanders to focus on alternative cultural production as a vehicle for her political positions. Her 1996 film, “Surviving Memory,” is a 16mm collage that collapses the historical events of the Holocaust, queer desire and gender, examining how memory constructs history. Her recent film “Once,” an experimental documentary that looks at Yiddish and the utopian desire of belonging, premiered at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival. Her award-winning first feature documentary, “Zero Degrees of Separation,” investigates the Palestinian Israeli conflict from the point of view of gay Palestinian and Israeli mixed couples. It premiered at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. Flanders’ most recent work, “Bird on a Wire,” is a film and video dual-projection with a live music performance. It premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, and will travel to four other cities over the course of one year. She is currently developing a new groundbreaking feature documentary.