Ruth Lawrence is a filmmaker based in St.
John’s, NL.
Ruth’s feature films include Little Orphans (Best Canadian Feature, Whistler Film Festival 2020), Hopeless Romantic (2018), and the comedy feature, Party Pirate, sold-out its opening Gala overnight at the St.
John’s International Women’s Film Festival in October 2023.
Her documentaries A Lot of Love in the Room (2021) and Circus by Komatik (2019) have been featured on CBC Gem.
She has directed, written, and/or produced on over 70 short films and webisodes.
She’s writing two features, one with Sherry White and one with Emily Bridger.
Ruth’s honours include the Joan Orenstein Best Actress Award, the RBC Michelle Jackson Award for Emerging Filmmaker, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council’s Artist of the Year, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, the YWCA Woman of Distinction, a WIFT-AT WAVE Award, the national Leslie Yeo Award for Volunteerism, and the inaugural Ross Leslie Award for her contributions to film and theatre.
The wedding of their youngest sister, Janet, brings Gwen and Kay home to St. John’s, Newfoundland. While Janet struggles to hide her family’s dysfunction, Kay can’t help but create chaos wherever she goes and Gwen finds herself paralyzed by a past secret. The complicated web of relationships between the sisters, their Aunt Maureen, their absent mother, and Kay’s young daughter Billie, is only illuminated by the wedding. Gwen’s attempts to get Kay to take responsibility for her daughter highlights her own abandonment of her ex, Tom, leading them all to a not-so-perfect storm of a reception.
Diminished by grief, 18-year-old Tess (Kelly Van Der Burg) is moving through her life like a ghost. The one thing that comforts her is listening to the music of Danny Sharpe (Joel Thomas Hynes), a local legend who left home almost 20 years ago. Tess is stunned when she wakes up one day to find him in her kitchen, igniting a spark of life in her that grows out of control.
Maura Mackenzie believes the world is hers to conquer. With her career as a concert pianist gaining momentum, it seems her beauty and talent will be strong enough to mask the demons that threaten to engulf her. But with an absent husband and two young daughters at home, her precarious sanity begins to unravel until one summer day, burning with manic energy, she makes a terrible mistake — a mistake that will change her life forever. The consequences for Maura are catastrophic: her ambitious husband runs for his life, taking the children with him, leaving Maura to lapse into a full-scale breakdown. Life as she knew it is now over. With the help of her father, Ian, Maura works to reclaim her life and waits for a miracle to bring her daughters home. But when the fates align, can the past be forgiven?
A group of humans arrive on Sirius 6-B to investigate an SOS signal sent out from the planet, which has been supposedly deserted since the destruction of the man-made weapons known as "screamers." Once the squad arrives, they find a group of human survivors eking out an existence in an old military outpost.
In this chilling, atmospheric thriller, Katelyn (Lindy Booth) seeks answers about the brutal murder that claimed her mother's life 20 years ago in the lighthouse where they lived, a crime for which her grief-and-guilt-crazed father has long held the blame. When developers descend on the abandoned lighthouse and begin to vanish mysteriously, Katelyn comes face-to-face with the evil haunts the family's former abode.
This award winning miniseries traces the difficult passage of young Mary Keane (Aoife McMahon) from servitude in Ireland to the squalor of rough-and-tumble Newfoundland in the early 1800s. Escaping attempted rape and abuse, Mary moves on with her infant daughter to find shelter at a remote fishing station run by Thomas Hutchings (Colm Meaney). In a time and place where life and death are a hair's breadth apart, Mary joins the community's struggle for survival against sickness and starvation. All of the Cape's people are fugitives of one kind or another, but by pulling together through hardships and tragedies, they forge a new life of hope - and even love.
The Untold Story of the Suffragists of Newfoundland (1999) is a docu-drama celebrating the thirty year struggle by the women of Newfoundland to win the right to vote.
A graduate of an elite training school is determined to discover the identity of her lost father. She begins a dangerous journey, meeting an array of characters as she discovers her past. Stars Henry Czerny, Michael Luke.