Patricia Rozema

Patricia Rozema is a Canadian lesbian filmmaker known for I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), a charming, low-budget film about a quirky woman who works for an art gallery and develops an obsession with its director -- a film that uses the mermaid metaphor to encode lesbian longing -- and for Mansfield Park (1999), an adaptation of Jane Austen that foregrounded the novel's feminist and postcolonial dimensions. She also directed White Room (1990), a suburban gothic neo-noir, and When Night Is Falling (1995), a lesbian romance that won audience awards at festivals worldwide and remains a touchstone of queer cinema, as well as Into the Forest (2016), starring Elliot Page and Evan Rachel Wood, and Mouthpiece (2019). She has been openly lesbian throughout her career and is one of the central figures of Canadian queer cinema.