Anne Pick is an award-winning independent producer, director and story-editor. Her passion for story telling began as a teenager writing for her father’s country newspaper, which led to a career in journalism in Australia and later with the CBC Current Affairs unit in Canada, before she struck out on her own as an independent documentary filmmaker in 1987.
Anne is a highly regarded, and tireless advocate for the Canadian documentary filmmaking community. For 35 years she has lead various boards and committees working to protect and sustain documentary filmmaking opportunities with organizations like DOC, Hot Docs and currently imagineNATIVE and is proud to have helped many celebrated Canadian filmmakers get their start. She was also a founding board member of Hot Docs and also the Toronto Children’s Aid Foundation.
Among her many film awards including a Gemini in Canada, AFI in Australia and the Prince Rainier III Special Prize for Best Environmental Film in Monte Carlo. Anne received the prestigious Don Haig Award at Hot Docs in 2015 and in 2019 was presented with the Documentary Organization of Canada Luminary award in acknowledgement of her production achievements, advocacy and mentoring of new talent throughout her career.
Bill Spahic had a long and successful career in the film industry as a First AD on features, TV Movies and Episodics, before joining his wife Anne as a director, producer and writer at Real to Reel.
Although he had a science degree in his back pocket, Bill’s ambition after university was to make films. He toughed it out in the fledgling indie film industry in Canada for a while, then honed his craft as a First Assistant Director in the drama department at the CBC, heading back out into the independent world to be Gordon Pinsent’s 1 st AD on a Canadian drama feature JOHN AND THE MISSUS. His career has taken him around the world and allowed him to work closely with such talents as Terry Gilliam, Vincenzo Natali, Lucy Lui, Bruce McDonald, Meg Tilley, Juliet Lewis, Patti La Belle, John Woo, Jeff Bridges, Rod Steiger, Whoopi Goldberg, Neve Campbell, Matthew Perry, Phyllis Diller, Eric Till, Jeremy Northam, Gabriella Martinelli and of course Gordon Pinsent among many, many others. Working with such uniquely gifted individuals in the feature fiction world richly impacted his approach to the documentary genre.