Tom Perlmutter, TWH 2023 Directors Assistant

Tom began his career as a freelance writer in England and Canada. He has received Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council funding for his writing. He subsequently focused on documentary filmmaking before returning to fiction. He has written, produced and/or directed over a hundred documentaries, which have been broadcast in Canada, the United States, Europe as well as China, Japan and in Latin America. Tom was the head of the National Film Board of Canada. Under his aegis, the NFB garnered five Oscar nominations for short animation. At the NFB, he launched Canada’s first film streaming service in the same year that Netflix launched theirs. He also pioneered explorations in interactive documentaries, winning Webbies and International Emmys.

In the last few years, he has taken up long-distance cycling. In 2019, he biked from Cairo to Cape Town (his previous experience of cycling had been limited to tootling around town on a 20-year old Norco). Last year, he did a six-month cycling trek from the Arctic Ocean to the Panama Canal. He blogged about it for a cycling magazine and on his Substack Newsletter.