Penelope Buitenhuis

Penelope is an award winning writer and director with a distinguished career working in Europe, Japan, Canada and the US. Most recently she co-wrote and directed A Wake which won best feature at numerous festivals, receiving first prize for the screenplay at the Rhode Island Film Festival and nominated for the DGC best director award. Her documentary Tokyo Girls about western women who work as hostesses in Japan, received two Leo Awards and two Geminis for best cinematography and editing and screened at festivals worldwide. Graduating in film from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, she became known as a guerrilla filmmaker in the underground scene in Berlin, New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam and Toronto. Her short film Llaw offered a radical perspective on the fall of the Berlin wall premiering at the Berlin Film festival to critical acclaim. A retrospective of her work entitled Guns, Girls and Guerrillas was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her film poem A Dream of Naming premiered at TIFF followed by the feature Trouble, about the post Berlin Wall music and political scene which received Best Film honors at numerous festivals around the world. She then directed Boulevard, a thriller starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Lance Henriksen and Rae Dawn Chong and went on to work in television. Penelope's next big feature project is Guilty, a female led psychological thriller and UK/Canadian co-production which is out to cast for an early 2018 shoot.