Filmmakers

Kelly-Anne Riess, director and producer

A CTV National Fellow at the Banff World Media Festival in 2011, Riess has worked as a writer, unit director and researcher on the TV show Crime Stories, which aired on A&E Biography, Discovery Investigation and History Television.

Travelling across North America, Riess interviewed police officers who solved some of the most gruesome serial killer cases in the world. She has also worked on TV shows such as the Gemini Award-winning Drug Class, In Justice, The Lodge, Concert in Canna and Struggle and Emerge: The Pere Athol Murray Story.

Riess has also written and produced a number of short films that have screened in film festivals across Canada and aired on SCN’s 15 Minutes of Fame. Recently, she completed a feature film script with the support of SaskFilm and Super Channel. Her first television job was working at the CBC Newsworld office in Calgary, where she was a part of the team that covered a number of top international stories, such as the SARS crisis and the American invasion of Iraq.

As a journalist, Riess works as a freelance arts and entertainment reporter for the Regina Leader-Post. She has profiled some of North America’s top artists, such as Joni Mitchell, Paul Anka and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Riess lived for a year up north, working for the Whitehorse Daily Star. While there, she covered a number of high profile crime stories, including seven murder trials. She also travelled across the sub-arctic to write about the Yukon Quest, a 1,600 dog sled race.

Riess has also shared the stories of prairie people with the rest of Canada by writing features for the Globe and Mail and Canadian Geographic. Her work has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, the Montreal Gazette, Business Edge, This Magazine, Alternatives Journal and Prairies North.

Her debut poetry collection To End a Conversation (Thistledown Press, 2008) has been featured on CBC Radio and The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Riess was the lead writer of the bestselling Saskatchewan Book of Everything (MacIntyre Purcell, 2009), a non-fiction fact book that features everything from wild weather to local slang. I Love Saskatchewan (MacIntyre Purcell), Riess’ first children’s book, quickly rose to the top of McNally Robinson’s bestseller list upon its release in 2012.


Thomas Bartlett, director of photography 

With a career spanning more then twenty-five years, Thomas Bartlett’s professional photographic, video and teaching work has taken him on international assignments in Africa and beyond.

His fine art photography has been exhibited in several galleries, including the Luz in Victoria and Neutral Ground in Regina. In fact, a collection of his images are part of the City of Regina’s permanent collection.

In the last few years, Thomas has pushed the discipline of photography beyond the traditional boundaries of “straight photography” into an impressionistic technique that both challenges and inspires the viewer. Tom has been taking all the production stills for "Finding Al," in addition to filming.