Join us for an engaging discussion with Canadian filmmaker Adrian Wills about his film, "A Quiet Girl." The film link will be sent to participants upon registration. To make the most of the event, we encourage everyone to watch the film beforehand. Adrian will join us to share insights into his journey with the film and participate in a Q&A session.

In A Quiet Girl, adopted Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills commits, on camera and in real time, to unravelling the mystery of his complex beginnings in Newfoundland. Spurred on by a meager clue in his adoption documents, Wills spends two years travelling from the wild beauty of Canada’s most eastern coastline to the red heat of Arizona in search of answers. What Wills finally uncovers pierces into the meaning of family, revealing disquieting parallels between his own life and that of the birth mother he never knew.

This moving feature documentary combines 16mm footage and contemporary images with deeply personal conversations, transforming an urgent search for identity into a quest to give a quiet girl her voice. Ultimately, Wills honours his birth mother’s resilience and, in doing so, reveals his own. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has provided a private, commercial-free Vimeo link for registrants to view the film before this presentation.

About Adrian
Adrian Wills is an award-winning director, series co-creator and showrunner with a passion for character-driven storytelling across various genres. His projects range from the co-created sports drama series 21 Thunder (CBC/Netflix) to All Together Now: The Beatles Love, winner of the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video. A Quiet Girl is Wills’ first film with the National Film Board of Canada and his most personal one yet—a POV feature documentary that begins as a mystery about his adoption in Newfoundland. In 2023, Wills will be releasing a new feature music documentary entitled Leonard Cohen: Tower of Song.

A citizen of both Canada and Australia, Wills studied Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and Film Production at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, Canada.