Liz Marshall quickly reveals her collaborative spirit during our brief outdoor photo shoot in Lower Gibsons. “Scarf on or off?” she asks while posing in front of an ocean backdrop on Marine Drive. “Do you want to see some colour?” Together, we opt to keep her knotted red kerchief with an open neckline in the shot, rather than a thick black scarf that obscured her chin.
“Is this going to be an extra-wide shot?” Liz asks. The question doesn’t surprise me. After all, she’s directed many award-winning documentaries, including five features on diverse social justice issues ranging from the privatization of water (Water on the Table, 2010, featuring activist Maude Barlow) to the sustainable production of meat (Meat the Future, 2021, narrated by Jane Goodall). Her long list of awards and nominations includes recognition from the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and Canadian Screen Awards plus “audience favourite” accolades from festivals such as Toronto’s HotDocs, North America’s largest documentary screening event.
Yet, despite Liz’s many credits as director, producer, and writer and her globetrotting filmmaking career, it was her move from Toronto to Gibsons in 2020 that brought about a cultural first for her. She was invited, as a settler director, to collaborate on the documentary s-yéwyáw/AWAKEN with three Indigenous multimedia creators: Kawaya7 Ecko Aleck of the Nlaka’pamux Nation (Lytton, BC), Kwamanchi Alfonso Salinas of the shíshálh Nation and Charlene SanJenko of Splatsin of the Secwépemc Nation (Shuswap, BC), a former Gibsons, BC councillor.
Liz recognizes that her involvement demanded “huge trust” from these writer/producers. Together, they created a Telus-financed film that honours and shares the traditional cultural teachings and legacies of four Indigenous elders, including two notable shíshálh Nation members. For instance, Kawaya7 appears on camera in dialogue with her father Wenecwtsin Terry Coyote Aleck as she learns to be a medicine woman. (Wenecwtsin led a monthly drumming circle at St. Hilda’s Church in Sechelt until his move to Edmonton last year.)
The documentary also features shíshálh Nation’s knowledge-keepers xwu’p’a’lich Barbara Higgins, who died last November, and hiwus Calvin Craigan, along with Kukpi7 Wayne Christian, chief of Splatsin First Nation of BC’s Central Interior. In the film, Higgins teaches Salinas the protocols for a traditional canoe ceremony as he pursues his dream to create a canoe family for the shíshálh Nation.
The poignant documentary, which addresses healing and resiliency following the searing impact of Canada’s residential schools, was released nationwide on Feb. 13. A month before its December 2023 screening in Sechelt, s-yéwyáw/AWAKEN had a sold-out West Coast premiere in Vancouver. Its world premiere in Toronto last October earned the People’s Choice Award at the Planet in Focus International Environmental Film Festival.
Liz says that for her, making the film, which took 1.5 years of daily effort, elicited “a profound process of decolonization.
“Indigenous storytelling is the centrepiece,” she explains from a table at Wheatberries café in Gibsons. “A lot of traditional ceremony, such as song, drumming or some kind of prayer, is infused in the story because that’s their [Indigenous] protocol. I really see the film as a sacred space.”
As the niece of Nancy Budd-Denham, co-founder of the syiyaya Reconciliation Movement with former shíshálh chief Garry Feschuk, Liz says the film reflects the spirit of this local community initiative.
After almost a half-century in Toronto, where she was born and raised, Liz says she embraces her new home of Gibsons, grateful for the “culturally diverse vibe and connection” she has found here. As a child, she spent summers exploring the beaches and forests of the Sunshine Coast and attended grade one at Sechelt Elementary School while living with her grandparents. “I feel it [the Coast] in my bones,” she says. “The landscapes, hues, colours, smells and textures are all very formative to who I am.”
She now spends more time with her parents Grainger Cowie and Diane Marshall, who live locally. Both are featured in her 2018 documentary Midian Farm, which explores life on a commune the couple started in 1971 in Beaverton, Ont.
Liz says she’s drawn to individuals or social movements that resist systems of power and control, whether that’s capitalism, patriarchy, organized religion, or corporate takeovers. In Water on the Table, which she wrote, produced and directed, Liz followed Maude Barlow for a year in her demanding role as the United Nations senior advisor on water. This film won Best Canadian Feature Award at the 2010 Planet in Focus Film Festival.
Three years later, Liz, a vegan, won the same award for her feature documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine, which exposes the abusive treatment of animals in the food, fashion, entertainment and research industries.
Last year, she was nominated by YWCA Metro Vancouver for a Women of Distinction Award. Back in 2001, she and four others received the Canadian Association of Broadcasters gold medal for the documentary Musicians in the War Zone, which bears witness to the impact of war on children. Liz directed it over two years while working as the media director for War Child Canada. When the film premiered on MuchMusic, it attracted a half-million viewers.
In 2005, Liz, as director, won the Canadian Broadcasters’ gold medal again, with producer Tania Natscheff, for the documentary Inside Your Threads, which exposes the unregulated conditions of sweatshop workers in Mexico and Bangladesh.
Liz is a founding member of the Canadian chapter of Film Fatales, a global collective of experienced women and nonbinary feature film and TV directors dedicated to expanding the landscape of representation in storytelling. She cites Roberts Creek filmmaker Bonnie Klein as an inspiration. While a media arts student in the 1990s at Toronto’s Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Toronto Metropolitan University), Liz saw Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography, the 1981 acclaimed feminist documentary directed by Klein. After graduation, she received a master’s of fine arts degree in cinema production at York University.
Liz won’t divulge her next film project, but reveals that she would consider directing drama. A self-proclaimed “global citizen,” she says she didn’t move here to retreat and still loves cities. “I consider myself a [rural and urban] hybrid.”
