projects

Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo is a producer and former Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) programmer. She is the founder of Borrowed Light Films, a Toronto-based production company committed to making bold, story-driven films by underrepresented filmmakers, including women, BIPOC and LGBTQ2+ directors. Her most recent production, The Young Arsonists, was written and directed by internationally acclaimed visual artist Sheila Pye. It premiered at TIFF in 2022 and screened at prestigious festivals around the world including the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, International Film Festival of India Goa, Cairo International Film Festival and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The film was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Achievement in Sound. Agata is the Executive Producer of the award-winning Afghan-Canadian feature film Black Kite, which premiered at TIFF in 2017 and screened at more than 20 international festivals including the Munich International Film Festival, Göteborg Film Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. Black Kite won three Leo Awards, for Best Film, Director and Screenplay and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Score. Agata is currently in development on Raha Shirazi's TERRA and Tarique Qayumi’s The Letter.

Agata has over 20 years of experience in the film industry. Prior to producing, she was a Programmer at TIFF for ten years and was responsible for selecting Canadian feature and short films. In this role, she introduced audiences to many notable Canadian films, including Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, and discovered some of the country’s key emerging filmmakers, such as Anne Émond, Kazik Radwanski, Lindsay MacKay, Deborah Chow, Igor Drljaca and Albert Shin. Agata has sat on juries for the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the National Screen Institute, Women in Film and Television, and Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival. Her writing on filmmaker Patricia Rozema has appeared in several publications, including the anthology The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (2010). Prior to TIFF, she served as a lecturer in American cinema at the University of Genova in Italy. She holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies from York University and is an alumna of the Erich Pommer Institute's TAP producer programme.

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