Michael Fukushima has been making films since 1984. He joined the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in 1990 to direct the animated documentary Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), winner of the Hot Docs Best Short Documentary award. Michael became an NFB animation producer in 1997, co-founding the NFB’s flagship emerging filmmaker program, Hothouse, in 2002, and opening up the studio to new audiences and new technologies with a move towards urban and diverse stories and creators.
He was appointed executive producer of the NFB’s fabled Animation Studio in 2013. Notable films produced or executive produced by Michael include Genie Award winner cNote (2004), by Chris Hinton; Shira Avni’s animated documentary Tying Your Own Shoes (2009), which won the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig and the prestigious NHK Japan Prize; Ann Marie Fleming’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010); Muybridge’s Strings (2011), by Oscar-nominated Japanese filmmaker Koji Yamamura; Oscar-nominated films Dimanche (2011), by Patrick Doyon and Me and My Moulton (2014), by Torill Kove; and, most recently, Cordell Barker’s If I Was God and Randall Okita’s The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer. Michael now mostly produces the producers and offers up sagacity, but he continues to keep his hand in — this year, on the first short film in two decades by Oscar winners Alison Snowden and David Fine, and on Oscar winner Torill Kove’s next short film.
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
