Film and TV producer Jennifer Holness getting the recognition she deserves

February 10, 2022

Back in the day, most Caribbean parents wanted their children to consider careers in either law or medicine.

Keeping to the script, Jennifer Holness completed an undergraduate degree in Political Science in 1992 at York University and was preparing to apply to Osgoode Hall Law School when she suffered a brain aneurysm.

While relaxing with boyfriend-turned-husband Sudz Sutherland who she met in her second year at York where he majored in Film Studies, her severe headache required an ambulance call on a Saturday evening.

“The attendants said I probably had a migraine and I should stay home and rest before following up on Monday,” Holness recounted. “Sudz insisted they take me to a hospital which they did.”

The decision was lifesaving as a scan revealed a brain rupture.

“An artery was burst and blood was dripping which meant it was slowly suffocating my brain,” said Holness. “Had I listened to the attendants, I would not be here.”

After a seven-hour surgery and several months recuperating, including relearning to walk and talk, she changed focus.

“I decided I didn’t want to go back to school, but I would work with Sudz instead,” Holness pointed out.

Jennifer Holness (Photo contributed)

In 1993, they formed Hungry Eyes Film & Television Inc. that delivers award-winning programs.

“I was going to figure out what film and television was about,” said Holness who migrated from Jamaica at age six with an older sister to join their mother who was a single parent. “It just felt right to me even though there was no one in film and TV around me when I was growing up for me to even think about that as a career. However, I read a lot and wrote my little stories which nobody took as anything special. There was something in me to begin with. When I saw the possibility, I instinctively knew that that was for me.”

Starting with music videos, the first of which was nominated for a Canadian Music Video Award, she produced ‘Win/Loss/Tie’ in 1998 as part of the On the Fly Festival. The 10-minute short was selected the festival’s top film.

After producing five other shorts in four years, Holness’ first feature production, ‘Love, Sex and Eating the Bones’, garnered a lot of attention of accolades.

“That film represented the accumulation of a plan come through,” she said. “Myself and Sudz knew we had to make short films in order to get to the first feature. When we made that film, I went to the film centre with the intention of meeting the people from Ontario Creates because I didn’t know anyone in the industry. When we made the pitch, they were not sure how to take it. You have this Black guy who is into pornography meeting and falling in love with this girl who is celibate. It’s a comedy coming at a time when, I think, Canada was really in love with these kind of strange, dark and morbid artistic films where nobody said anything. For a lot of people, it was a very strange idea and story, but because of our body of work leading up to this point, Telefilm took a chance on us and we got that film made. There was a plan. We said this is what we want and this is how we think we can get there and it actually worked. What wasn’t planned was that our first daughter was 10 months old when we went into production.”

Jennifer Holness (r) and her husband Sudz Sutherland with Reelworld Film Festival founder Tonya Williams (Photo by Ron Fanfair)

Holness produced ‘Home Again’, a dramatic feature film about three adults deported to the land of their birth after spending significant time in foreign countries.

“For some people, I think it was the first time they considered the idea of Black people who were born somewhere else like Jamaica, raised abroad and then deported to their birth country,” she said. “I don’t think many people gave much thought about who we were sending back home. I know we brought stories, ideas and humanity to the game.”

She is the only Black producer to win the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) Best Canadian First Feature Film Award for ‘Love, Sex and Eating the Bones’ and the first Black woman to secure a Canadian Screen Award for ‘Guns’, a Canadian miniseries that aired on CBC 14 years ago. 

A romantic comedy that premiered in 2003, ‘Love, Sex and Eating the Bones’ also received five Golden Sheaf Awards and three Genies for Best Writing.

Holness helped launched the career of several Canadian actors, including award-winning Stephan James who played the role of a spoiled British teenager deported for possession of a small quantity of drugs in ‘Home Again’.

Last year, she directed her first feature documentary, ‘Subjects of Desire’, that made TIFF’s Top 10 Canadian films and Hot Docs Festival Top 10 Audience Favourite lists and is part of TVOntario’s Black History Month programming.

Provocative and culturally significant, the film is told from the perspective of women who aren’t afraid to challenge conventional beauty standards and is partially set around the 50th anniversary of the Miss Black America Pageant.

The film was sparked by Holness’ desire to understand why her daughters White girlfriends coveted their beauty.

“The eldest of our three daughters had some friends over at the house and I overheard one of them talking about how she wanted a butt and lips like my daughter,” said Holness who was raised by her maternal grandmother in Montego Bay. “It was a very interesting conversation because growing up, fuller lips and having any kind of ‘booty’ was considered ugly. Black femininity, as we expressed it, was often perceived negatively. I was really shocked to see this White girl coveting these elements of my daughter. When I talked to her and our second daughter who is 18 months younger, it was kind of like the same kind of a thing. Even our youngest daughter is uncomfortable about how she felt sometimes that people would think she could twerk or that she was sexualized because she wasn’t into that overt sexual culture.

“I started looking to appropriation and what was that like for young girls. As a Black woman, I have known very clearly there were these stereotypes that dogged me my whole life. I have had so many people make little snide remarks about my company because I am the main producer. I have heard people say ‘you are this strong Black woman’ in an uncomplimentary way and ‘ you are an angry Black woman, what’s wrong with you?’ I have never really given these narratives much thought other than this is how Black people are seen. It was while doing some preliminary research that I really started to understand how powerful these narratives were and how they literally help determine how Black women are seen and treated in many ways. That research made me realize I wanted to make this film.”

After years of advocating for the elimination of anti-Black racism in Canadian Screen industries, Holness and a group of senior industry professionals founded the Black Screen Office. 

Other founding members include Sutherland, Reelworld Film Festival founder Tonya Williams, television executive Joan Jenkinson and Conquering Lion Pictures founders Clement Virgo and Damon D’Oliveira.

“Me and my husband have worked very hard with very little recognition because there hasn’t been those resources for us,” she said. “By the time George Floyd was murdered, I felt I was ready to give up. There was so little support. We were all working in silos for pittance in the most part. What I realized when Floyd died was that there was a willingness to actually acknowledge systemic racism. I felt we needed a national organization that would lobby on behalf of Black folks so that people didn’t have to go through the struggle that Sudz and I have had to go through daily just to survive and get what everyone else has been getting with so much less input.”

Jennifer Holness and Sudz Sutherland with Canadian rapper/songwriter Keysha Freshh (Photo by Ron Fanfair)

After rejecting invitations to join the CMPA board, Holness accepted the offer in late 2020 after the organization committed to be more diverse.

“The reason why I said no every time I was asked is because I knew I would be the one Black person who would be expected to fight the fight and then have no one listen to you,” she noted. “I said yes after thinking that in order to really make change, you have to be at the decision table.”

Jennifer Holness and her husband Sudz Sutherland were honoured at the Black Film & Video Network 11th Reel Black Awards in September 2000 (Photo by Ron Fanfair)

Flying under the radar for over two decades, Holness is finally getting the recognition she deserves.

In 2021, she was the recipient of the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) Indiescreen Established Producer of the Year Award and Afroglobal Television Entertainment Award. Next month, she will be honoured at the 34th annual Women In Film & Television (WIFT) Crystal Awards luncheon with the Creative Excellence Award.

“It is good to know that people are starting to see that our work is contributing,” Holness said. “This is work that is making a global impact and it’s nice to see it being recognized. Up until a few years ago, the number of Black folks making content for film and television was few and far between. I really feel that the work we do have great impact.”

Holness and Sutherland co-created ‘BLK: An Origin Story’ that’s a four-part series exploring untold stories of Black Canadians, ranging from Ontario’s early settlers and Blacks who helped to develop British Columbia in the Gold Rush era in the mid-1850s to the Maroons in Nova Scotia and Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood that’s the historical home to the Black English-speaking working-class community.

The docuseries premieres on ‘History’ on February 26 at 9 p.m.