Vic Sarin

A passionate and diverse filmmaker, Vic Sarin's career includes award-winning feature films, documentaries and television movies. Across five decades, Sarin has worked on over 100 films as a director and cinematographer, earning several national and international awards including the prestigious Kodak Lifetime Achievement Award for having created some of Canadian cinema's most moving and memorable images. More importantly, Sarin's career journey has taken him all over the world. From his native Kashmir, to documentary work around the globe filming in locations as diverse as the North Pole, Mount Everest and the Sahara desert, feature filmmaking on location all over North America and Europe, and a major series production in China, Sarin has lived with a sense of curiosity and adventure that is palpable in his films. Sarin began his career in Australia, creating documentary films for ABC. He then moved to Canada, where he built a reputation as a bold and creative cinematographer for CBC News and numerous primetime dramas on the network. As his career turned to directing, Sarin found success in both Canada and the United States, directing films such as Cold Comfort, In His Father's Shoes, Sea People, You've Come a Long Way Katie, and Trial at Fortitude Bay, earning three Emmy nominations and numerous Canadian Screen Awards along the way. In 2000, he directed the smash hit Christian film Left Behind, which generated over $100 million at the box office. More recently, under the banner of Sepia Films, the Vancouver-based production house he founded, Sarin has directed feature films including Partition, a love story set during the partition of India, starring Neve Campbell and Irrfan Khan and the award-winning A Shine of Rainbows, a family drama set in Ireland and starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen. He has also returned to the medium of his early career, directing numerous documentary films including Keepers of the Magic, a celebration of the power of cinema and the great cinematographers who inspired him throughout his career; The Boy From Geita, about an albino community in Tanzania, which earned a special screening for the United Nations; and Hue, a film that explores the complicated nature of skin colour prejudice, and which once again took him around the world to meet subjects in Brazil, the Philippines, Tanzania and India. Recently, Sarin's career has been captured in a retrospective book, Eyepiece, which chronicles his many journeys and allows him to share his views on the various subjects his career has touched. His career has taken him to more than 50 international film festivals including several where he served as a juror. He is currently preparing to shoot his next feature film on location in Ireland.