Writer-Director Carolyn Saunders is the 2022 winner of the Writers Guild of Canada’s Sondra Kelly Award, and an Academy Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinalist in 2021. She was also selected for the prestigious Meryl Streep/Nicole Kidman Writer’s Lab and her sci-fi feature script Island West is on Coverfly’s Red List, in the Top 1% of nearly 80,000 screenplays. She was just shortlisted for the Sundance Features Lab with the same feature script proposal that won her the Sondra Kelly Award.
Shortlisted three times for the Sundance Development Track with both series and feature projects, Carolyn writes across genres. She co-wrote Amazon’s critically acclaimed, feminist-skewed series Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, and is writing and directing a Cold War feature doc now in development with White Pine Pictures’ Emmy-winning producer Peter Raymont, with support from the Canadian Media Fund. She story-edited the 2019 Richard Dreyfuss-starring Astronaut and wrote episodes of the Canadian Screen Award winning
comedy webseries Tokens. Her co-written sci-fi thriller series pilot Invisible was a finalist at The Writers Lab UK 2021.
Carolyn’s 2021 short On Island West won the Directors UK Challenge Alexa and is currently on the festival circuit. Her short Sundown, about a mixed race soldier disconnected from his identity, debuted at the 2021 BAFTA-qualifying Carmarthen Bay Film Festival. In 2017, Carolyn made her directorial debut with the microbudget feature psychological thriller The Wasting. It was released theatrically in Canada, won multiple festival awards, and sold in six countries.
A dual Canadian-UK citizen, Carolyn is an alumna of the 2021 Directors UK Inspire Mentoring scheme and Canada’s Women in the Director’s Chair. She is a member of the Writers Guild of Canada and sits on the Board of Directors UK.
And about her co-written sci-fi thriller series pilot Invisible, it is currently in development with Toronto’s Shaftesbury.
Links to some press about the Ted Bundy doc:
https://jezebel.com/ted-bundy-falling-for-a-killer-renders-the-women-three-1841453387
‘Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer’ tells its story through the eyes of the survivors
https://decider.com/2020/01/31/ted-bundy-falling-for-a-killer-on-amazon-prime-stream-it-or-skip-it/
https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2020/02/07/ted-bundy-falling-for-a-killer-does-right-by-victims