Mara Ravins

MARA RAVINS is a history and theatre graduate from the University of Toronto and New Media (Film & Photography) graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design. She worked extensively as a performance and installation artist before devoting herself to film, beginning her career on such series as Friday the 13th, working thousands of hours on union shoots as a decorator/buyer and on set wardrobe. She has continued to work for over 25 years as a production designer, producer, writer and director. She is the first Canadian/Latvian to receive production funding from the Open Society Institute (now the Sundance Documentary Film Fund). A recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils and Danish Film Board and National Film Board of Canada, her films have played at international festivals garnering critical acclaim. She worked over ten years evaluating projects for financing, both domestic and international, at Ontario Creates (f.k.a OMDC) which supports feature films, television series and digital media projects. She has served as a jury member on various arts councils. In addition to constantly creating new film work, she continues to serve as a freelance production consultant and mentor for young filmmakers and artists. Mara Ravins continues to work with celluloid photography, a passion she has cultivated for over 30 years. ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Discovering the Extraordinary within the Ordinary. In all my work I seek to discover some forth of truth and beauty as an answer to the questions: What do we value? Where does one find happiness, a sense of self and belonging? Where is the potential for genuine connection with others and the world through accepting our weaknesses, fears, moral and emotional disarray outside of the confines of judging ourselves, our actions and others as good or evil, right or wrong. No matter how desperate, lonely and isolated one may feel, some form of grace will always enter, if one allows for that – as hope, beauty or love. My film work continues to explore these themes with an emphasis on redemption within exile in the feature screenplay Siberian Story. My current project adapting Karin Fossum’s brilliant crime novel Den Onde Viljen to screen, explores morality and accountability after a late night foolish decision causes the accidental death of a young immigrant. I have always been interested in the aesthetics of visual language, focusing on the textures, colours, spatial design, lighting and sound within each setting, environment and landscape, attentive to the finest details in their potential to create a more evocative, seductive, metaphorical, associative possibility for the viewer to experience a story through the medium of cinema. This allows me to explore the relationship between place and the emotional rendering, foreshadowing and development of a character’s or a person’s inner emotional worlds. I remain deeply inspired by the work of Kim Ki Duk, Andrea Arnold, Afnes Varda, Clare Denis, Xavier Dolan, Harmony Korinne, Antonioni, Techine, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Jia Zhangke, Thomas Vinterberg to name a few of my favourite film artists. https://www.mararavins.com