Marie Clements
Librettist
Marie Clements (Métis/Dene) is the librettist for Missing, a chamber opera with music by Brian Current, co-commissioned and co-produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria. The world première production of Missing was staged in November 2017, in Vancouver and Victoria. Missing will be remounted in November 2019 in Victoria, Vancouver, Regina & Prince George.
Marie is an award-winning writer, director and producer who has worked to ignite her brand of independent story-making to a variety of mediums including film, TV, radio, new media and live performance.
Her latest project, feature drama Red Snow has been nominated for 10 Leo Awards, and her feature music documentary The Road Forward, produced by the NFB, premiered at Hot Docs, opened the 2017 DOXA Documentary Film Festival, and closed the 2018 Imaginative Film Festival, receiving five Leo Awards including Best Production, Best Director, and Best Screenwriter.
The Road Forward has screened at over 300 venues in North America and also received a Best Director Award at the North American Indian Festival in San Francisco, as well as a Writer’s Guild Nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay in 2018, the WFF Women on Top Award and the WITV Spotlight Impact Award 2018.
Her documentary Looking at Edward Curtis premiered at DOXA, The Yorkton Film Festival, and on the Knowledge Network. Her multi- award winning films have screened at Cannes, TIFF, MOMA, VIFF, Whistler Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival and ImagineNATIVE Film Festival.
Her fifteen plays have been presented on some of the most prestigious stages for Canadian and international work, garnering numerous awards and publications including the 2004 Canada-Japan Literary Award, and two prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award nominations.
Clement is working on a tv miniseries with Grana Productions and CBC titled Bone of Crows and a limited tv series with Good Films titled Leaves Awaken. Her Unnatural and Accidental Women opened the first Indigenous Theatre Season at The National Arts Centre in September 2019.
Marie is President of her media company MCM and Artistic Director of red diva projects. Marie is an alumna of Women In the Director’s Chair (WIDC) in Banff.
In the hands of librettist Marie Clements … words become as powerful as arrows, each one piercing deep-seated emotions, from guilt, sorrow and enlightenment among white viewers to – for Indigenous members of the audience – grief and a sense of vindication from having the suffering of one’s community acknowledged and honoured in a public setting…
Missing is an extraordinarily moving and thought-provoking work, and a milestone for the opera world. It has taken a painful and horrifying topic and rendered it into accessible art. Ultimately, its message is a universal one: open our eyes and hearts to each other’s pain. By doing so, humanity has a chance for healing and redemption. Missing begins this healing journey in a magnificent mélange of singing, acting and music that, one hopes, will be seen by audiences across Canada and the world.
Roberta Staley, The Whole Note. Review of Missing, City Opera Vancouver / Pacific Opera Victoria, 2017.