Award-winning documentary producer Silva Basmajian started her career without a road map, a strategy or even an avid interest in film. This makes her backstory just as compelling and fascinating as the nearly 200 true stories she has brought to screens across Canada and the world, spanning nearly four decades.
Breaking into the film business never comes with a set of instructions or guarantees, and is not a journey for the faint of heart. Yet, the Lebanese born Basmajian, who immigrated as a child to Canada with her family, literally fell into what would be the role of a lifetime—and by lifetime meaning from the day she was hired as a rookie researcher at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) to the day she retired as one of its top producers and executive producers.
Basmajian is quick to acknowledge that her career is set apart from most. She landed at an institution that was, in many ways, unlike any other in the world. As she explains it, “NFB is an 80-year-old institution funded by the Canadian federal government that continually reinvents itself, putting innovation and auteur-driven films over commercial goals. Remarkably, NFB films could even be critical of the government that funds them. For talent, it has a world-class reputation as a creative incubator, integrating storytelling with high-quality cinematography, editing, effects and music.” She adds that filmmakers are encouraged to be three years ahead of whatever was making headlines and to identify subjects before they became issues. “By the time it’s on the news,” Basmajian says, “it’s already too late for that subject.” Her marching orders were to use visual storytelling to expose injustice, amplify marginalized voices, and create social change. Reason enough why Basmajian aptly calls herself a “social impact producer.
NFB documentary producers like Basmajian had another major advantage. They were trained across every dimension of filmmaking from script development, technical troubleshooting, crew management, and budget oversight to creative supervision through the editing room. “You had to learn all the functions of filmmaking before you even became a producer,” she explains. “We were also trained to fully understand the entire fact-driven content we were presenting as storytellers.”
For all the many pinchable moments of how fortunate she was to never have to hustle between gigs, find backing for a project, distribute her work independently, or trade off creative independence for job security, there are far more awards and accolades, rave reviews, along with scores of anecdotes and object lessons that Basmajian is eager to share in vivid detail, as if watching it all unfold frame by frame in real time.
From her perspective, the real credit goes to her intellectual obsessions, as a researcher. She recounts how, while still in college, majoring in history and political science, she was always late with her papers. She describes her young self as not knowing when to quit. “The professors kept saying, ‘Stop researching. Start writing your paper,’” she laughs. “I found it so fascinating, because it would lead me from one area to another.”
This free form discovery eventually paid off when studying the United Empire Loyalists, the British colonists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution. Buried in historical records was a single line noting they had brought enslaved people with them. That one line sent her down a rabbit hole. She developed a thesis, contacted a professor writing a book on the history of Blacks in Canada, began primary research, and soon found herself presenting findings to TV Ontario, Canada’s public education media organization funded by the provincial government.
The NFB, which had just opened a Toronto office, came aboard as co-producer. That meeting changed everything. Basmajian was hired as a researcher, promoted to coordinator, then associate producer—working her way steadily up the chain to produce and executive produce a treasure trove of groundbreaking documentaries, each a showcase of her mastery as a storyteller and the heart and soul she pours into every project.
If you don’t have a good story, you can have the most expensive camera in the world, and it means nothing.
Many of her biggest stories were built from something small and incidental: a passing radio segment overheard on a late-night drive, a single provocative sentence buried in a newspaper, a statistic so startling it changes everything. With her researcher’s investigative zeal and innate social consciousness, Basmajian’s documentaries didn’t just reflect society, they transformed it.
In 1988, Basmajian produced one of Canada’s first serious exposés on elder abuse, the first series under her name. Originally, she heard about the issue on a late-night radio program and thought she’d misheard. “Elder abuse? No, no—there’s child abuse, animal abuse. Not elder.” She tracked down the commentator, assembled a team, and what began as a single film grew into a three-part series called The Elderly at Risk. It followed a 65-year-old man living alone in a gentrified Toronto neighborhood, surrounded by cats, resisting removal by public health officials. The film screened before a Canadian Senate task force on the subject. Its chairman told Basmajian afterward that he had learned more in forty minutes watching the film than in six months sitting on the committee. The series went on to influence public legislation.
She followed with the Feminization of Poverty, a four-part series examining how women—from teenage single mothers to middle-class divorcées to elderly women on fixed incomes—were disproportionately bearing the weight of economic hardship. Then came Out (1992), an unflinching documentary on LGBTQ youth at a time when the subject was so controversial that broadcasters initially refused to air it. The film’s driving statistic: an estimated 40 percent of teen suicides were among gay youth who had nowhere to turn. Broadcasters ultimately aired it a year after completion.
Basmajian is especially proud of Highrise—one of the most successful projects for global impact and recognition, which she executive-produced. The groundbreaking multi-year, multi-city production that integrated film with the Web was hailed as a showcase of how the digital revolution could change the form of documentary films. It went on to win two Emmys, a Peabody, and Webby Awards, among many others. Soon after came another standout that Basmajian executive-produced called The Stories We Tell, by the acclaimed Canadian independent filmmaker Sarah Polley. It won prestigious awards from the NY Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Board of Review, to name but a few.
Adding to her credits are Fields of Endless Day, a landmark documentary on the history of Blacks in Canada for which jazz legend Oscar Peterson composed the score; and My Father’s Camera, a film built from a father’s home footage of mid-century Toronto, which won a Peabody. She also collaborated on a pioneering experiment in cellphone short filmmaking that won the equivalent of the Spanish Oscar. Basmajian says it proves one important truth: Technology is never the story. “If you don’t have a good story, you can have the most expensive camera in the world, and it means nothing.”
Turning to the matter of trust in a documentary, Basmajian says, “Getting ordinary people to tell painful, private truths on camera, permanently and publicly is a matter of sharing the same purpose. We would say to them: ‘You need to trust us. This is what we’d like to do, and here is why.’ When subjects understood that the goal was to prevent the next death, to change legislation, or to give voice to those invisible to the system, they stepped forward willingly. Their goals and the filmmakers’ goals became one.”
In her experience, there is one question most aspiring filmmakers ask wrong. They want to know how the story ends. She wants to know whether the story matters either way. “The women’s hockey film—we started a year and a half before the 1998 Nagano Olympics,” she explains. “If Canada won, we had a great story. If they lost, we still had a great story.” That, she says, is the difference between reportage and documentary: “Reportage tells you what happened; documentary finds the human journey inside it, the subtext and context that make the result almost beside the point.”
Basmajian retired from the NFB on a deliberate high note: with her final productions honored, her principles intact, her reputation for films that changed hearts, minds and lives the stuff of legacy. Yet, by any other name, her retirement is simply a new form of engagement. She sits on festival juries, mentors emerging Armenian filmmakers, and serves as moderator and discussant at panels for Canada’s Pomegranate Film Festival and AGBU, an Armenian organization she grew up with. Her father headed up the AGBU Toronto Chapter and her sister has chaired the Chapter. She continues to support the organization and participate in its cultural events.
Basmajian also suggests that the Genocide narrative could be given a different context, meaning not always driving the plot. “We might want to start looking at contemporary issues—with new themes that invite audiences in, wherever they’re from,” she notes. “There is a new generation of Armenian filmmakers telling old and new stories in different ways. It’s exciting to see the emerging talent growing globally.”
It’s a refreshing perspective from someone who built her entire career on finding the story nobody thought to tell and then making sure the world couldn’t look away.
