Mia Donovan is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer from Montreal. As an artist Mia’s work focuses on humanizing people who have often been misrepresented by the media. Her first documentary film, Inside Lara Roxx (2011), follows ex-porn star Lara Roxx over a tumultuous 5-year-period as she struggles to build a new identity and find hope in the wake of her past. Inside Lara Roxx was nominated for a Jutra in 2012 and also won Best Documentary on Society and Humanity from the Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival, 2011. She was the recipient of the Don Haig Award in 2012. Her latest documentary, Deprogrammed (2015), is inspired by a family event that has plagued her mind for the last 20 years: her stepbrother’s deprogramming from an alleged Satanic cult back in the early ‘90s. Looking into his story, she meets the infamous ‘Father of Deprogramming’ himself, Ted ‘Black Lightning’ Patrick – and begins to unravel his notorious legacy.
The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 – a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist in America.