Joshua Demers is an award-winning writer, director and producer based in Canada. He has a wide array of interests…sometimes too wide…
Born on a military base in Cold Lake, Alberta to a francophone Québecois father and an anglophone mother, he bounced around Ontario and Alberta as a child before settling in Toronto… sort of. There he graduated from York University with a Master of Screenwriting and a Bachelor of Film Production (summa cum laude). He was also a mentoree through the CMPA Mentorship Program and started working with Canadian film producers on how to struggle feature films over the line.
His short film, Emily 1898-1910, was funded through the now defunct BravoFACT and was selected as part of the 2015 CBC Short Film Faceoff. Other shorts, such as Norma Jeane & the Tropic of Cancer, streamed at various international film festivals.
Joshua directed the first season of the web series Kristal Clear, created/written by Amanda Fahey (Anne with an E, Saving Hope), which received the awards for Best Web Series and Best Actress in a Comedy (Melanie Leishman) at Hollyweb. Other festival appearances and wins included it being one of two Canadian projects selected for the New York Television Film Festival, and a win for Best Visual Effects at the International Academy of Web Television Awards.
His feature film debut as a director, the trilingual political comedy Québexit, was funded through Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program. It later won the Best Screenplay in a Borsos Film (shared with co-writers Gail Maurice and Xavier Yuvens) at the Whistler Film Festival.
He is in development on an untitled horror project to follow up Québexit and is a producer with creator Shannon Fewster on her digital series, Lady Ada’s Secret Society, slated for a 2021 shoot/release.
Other production credits include serving as a production manager on the documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, as well as the digital series Damaged (also line producer) and Sudden Master. He also served as Triptych Media’s associate producer on The Girl King and has performed a variety of other functions: COVID-19 Safety Coordinator (A Family Seduction), Business Affairs (Prisoner X), development researcher for an upcoming Insight Productions project and TAD (Skating to New York).
Overall, he has 11+ years in the Canadian film and digital content industries and speaks good French for an anglophone (or an assimilated French Canadian).
Creatively he is drawn to the empathic power of stories and narratives to shape and explore our lives as well as the intersection of identity, language and politics. In the words of Jean Renoir, ‘the awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons’.
And he loves finding them all.