This article originally appeared in Take One magazine in December 2004.

Through an ever-changing landscape of talent, government policy and industry, booms and busts, Patricia Rozema remains one of Canada's most internationally recognized filmmakers. Faced with the challenges of local and national arts finding policies, she has navigated through decades of a male-dominated industry, resisted the lure of Hollywood (though not of Europe) and reached the enviable status of auteur filmmaker. Praised and revered, criticized and censured, her filmmaking has provoked strong reactions on both sides of the spectrum.

Born in 1958 in Kingston, Ontario, Rozema was raised in southern Ontario by Dutch Calvinist parents and educated in Canada and the U.S. at Christian schools. While completing her B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rozema decided that she would become a journalist. She worked at television news stations in the U.S., and as an associate producer at CBC's The Journal in Toronto, but she soon realized her powerful attraction to the world of fiction and, in 1985, enrolled in a filmmaking course at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. While gaining industry, experience as Don Owen's assistant on Unfinished Business, third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly, as well as on a number of television shows, Rozema began submitting her own proposals to art councils. Though she had little success initially--proposal after proposal was rejected--Rozema persisted and that persistence paid off brilliantly.

Right from the start of her narrative filmmaking career, Rozema quickly began to establish the thematic and stylistic terrain that would later come to define her entire oeuvre. Her films are elegant fairy-tale like stories inhabited by idiosyncratic outsider protagonists, typically struggling artists, set on paths toward enlightenment. Throughout her body of work she maintains a graceful feminist consciousness and has established herself as a remarkably sensual visual sty, list. But there is also a vibrant, formal adventurousness in Rozema's work, marked by self-referential narration and a rich intertextuality, which has also come to define her signature style.

Rozema's vision is an inquisitive, active vision that pushes boundaries, searches for context, reinvents and engages other cultural works in meaningful ways. Her search for knowledge, some sort of truth, is revealed in both her method of making films and the journeys of the characters she creates. This auteur's thematic concerns are that of authorship itself: the struggle and processes of creativity and self-expression, the immeasurable value of artistic creation, the questioning of traditional aesthetic standards and the relationship between artists and their audience. What does emerge is a singular truth: artistic expression is truly one of the noblest endeavours.

Patricia Rozema's first break came when she finally received an arts council grant to rewrite a script that would become her first short film. Passion: A Letter in 16 ram (1985) is an intriguing and intimate 28-minute filmic love letter to an unidentified lover. The composer of said letter is a documentary filmmaker, Anne Vogel, played by Linda Griffiths. The film explores Anne's struggle to come to terms with a failed romantic relationship, as she recounts her attempts to balance her work life and personal life. It is during the break up, however, that Anne creates her most passionate and successful work--a film she deeply cares about and one that goes on to win much acclaim. But in the process, she loses a relationship. Establishing her keen interest in the subject of the artist figure, a subject that Rozema would revisit often, Passion also reveals Rozema's desire to experiment with the medium. Anne directly addresses the camera and audience in an intimate, confessional manner, as Rozema stretches the boundaries of filmmaking as letter writing. Funded by arts councils and the NFB, Passion went on to win the Silver Plaque at the Chicago Film Festival and also screened at the then Toronto Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival).

It would be Rozema's first feature-length film, however, that would propel her into cinema's international limelight. I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) is undoubtedly one of Canada's most celebrated and circulated success stories. A serious comedy about a socially inept temporal- secretary, the film stars Sheila McCarthy in a standout performance as Polly Vandersma. Told as a confession via video camera, Polly narrates the tale of getting a new job at the sophisticated Church Gallery, falling in love with the gallery's worldly curator, Gabrielle St. Peres (Paule Baillargeon), and the other amazing and troubling things she has witnessed.

While Polly struggles to fit into her new intimidating environment, she nurtures her pastime of photography and escapes into her safe and brilliant inner fantasy world where, for once, she is the star. Gabrielle, her girlfriend Mary Joseph (Ann Marie MacDonald), and Polly are all artists of varying abilities struggling to create by whatever means possible. With this film, Rozema questions traditional approaches of judging art and even what we value as art. From glowing paintings we cannot see, to Polly's utterly charming self-expressions-honest photographs and the most amazing dreams--Rozema succeeds in making her point of tossing aside objective standards. In Mermaids, Rozema also explores the demands of being an artist and the necessity of a split subject--a public/private split. Mary is the artist, the creator, but cannot cope with the public demands, so Gabrielle takes on the public persona of the artist. This is a theme that Rozema would draw on again in her later work.