Laura Rietveld

Laura Rietveld is an emerging documentary writer, filmmaker and winner of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec – Work by an Emerging Artist Award in Montreal (2015). In 2010, exasperated by the lack of diverse and meaningful stories told by the mainstream media, Laura resigned from a career in mainstream media. Bound by themes of identity, family and the human-nature connection, Laura's work has been published in English, Inuktitut and French. Her first documentary, Okpik's Dream (2015) won the Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize at the Montreal's First Peoples Festival, an honorable mention for the Grand Prize at the Innsbruck International Nature Festival in Austria, and was nominated for best documentary program at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her first music video, Broke Down Ski'Tuuq, was nominated for best music video at the Native American Music Awards (2018). Her most recent feature documentary, The Family of the Forest (2022), selected for First Pitch at the RIDM Forum (2018) and worked in a workshop with Sundance Collab (2021), was nearly seven years in the making. Laura holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Business and a BA in History from Queen's University, both Ontario institutions. She lives in rural Quebec with her young family and chickens, surrounded by the nature that nurtures her.