Patricia Gruben

[1][4][6] The Women’s Companion to International Film, edited by Annette Kuhn and Susannah Radstone, states that it "received immediate attention as the work of a major new figure in Canada’s Avant-Garde.

After its screening at the New York Film Festival, Sifted Evidence earned an Honorable Mention in J. Hoberman's Top Ten list for the Village Voice.

[1][6] Gruben worked for ten years in Toronto as a set decorator[11][12] on projects like Spasms (1982),[13] a horror film directed by William Fruet, before initiating her own first feature.

[1] She also wrote and directed Deep Sleep (1990), a psychological thriller starring Megan Follows (Anne of Green Gables), and Ley Lines (1993),[5][11] a documentary about the fiction we create from our family history, following her own imaginary lineage from Texas to Germany and the Canadian Arctic.

[17] However, it was adopted by the Whistler Film Festival, where it continues as the WFF Screenwriters Lab[2] In addition to filmmaking, Gruben has created The Secret Doctrine, a play about the Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, which was staged in Vancouver in 2013, starring Gabrielle Rose; and an accompanying art installation, The Veil of Nature, which simulated the laboratory of Oliver Lodge, a 19th-century physicist, and occult scientist.

[2][6][20] The award requires that the recipient be "a woman who has achieved significant success in the field of film or television, and who is recognized for mentoring other women in the industry.