OPTIC NERVE FILMS

Optic Nerve Films is the production company of award-winning producer and director, Kevin Eastwood. The company was founded in 2004 as a boutique production company dedicated to making high quality, artistic and intelligent fiction and non-fiction media content for audiences around the world. 

Most recently, Optic Nerve Films produced Haida Modern, the latest feature documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Charles Wilkinson, about one of Canada’s greatest living artists, legendary Haida carver Robert Davidson. The film was an official selection at Hot Docs 2020, won Best Canadian Film at the Festival International du Film sur l'Art and won Most Popular Canadian Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Before that Optic Nerve produced After the Sirens for CBC Television, a documentary about the epidemic of PTSD amongst paramedics that was nominated for Best Documentary by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, the Yorkton Film Festival and the Leo Awards.

Other recent non-fiction credits produced by Optic Nerve include Vancouver: No Fixed Address, which premiered at Hot Docs and enjoyed a very successful five-week theatrical run; Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World, which also premiered at Hot Docs (where it won the festival's top prize), and went on to win the Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary at the DGC Awards; The Death Debate, which received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Direction; the Yorkton Golden Sheaf Award-winning documentaries Oil Sands Karaoke and Do You Really Want to Know? (the latter directed by Oscar-winner John Zaritsky); and Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson directed by Trish Dolman, which won Best Documentary at the Projecting Change Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.

On the scripted side, Optic Nerve produced Preggoland, a feature comedy directed by Jacob Tierney and starring Sonja Bennett, James Caan and Danny Trejo. The film premiered as a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival where it received rave reviews and went on to win Most Popular Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Best in Show at the Fargo Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Film at the Omaha Film Festival.

In addition to its documentary and feature films, Optic Nerve has also produced a wide array of shorter form content for clients such as Arts + Crafts, Knowledge Network, the David Suzuki Foundation and the BC Civil Liberties Association. Such projects include the Leo-nominated music video for Post-War Blues by Dan Mangan starring Don McKellar; the Gemini Award-nominated short documentary Douglas Coupland: Pop Artist and PSA campaigns on such topics as ending solitary confinement and physician-assisted dying.