About

Joel Elliott is a writer, filmmaker, archival producer, and researcher, whose work examines the visual remains of the past in stark, unflinching and intimate ways. His film Orphans [a requiem] (2016), which used bird stories to examine the breakup of the Korean peninsula, won Best Documentary at the Baikal International Film Festival. More recently, the all-archival short The Great Silence (2022), about Woodrow Wilson and the Spanish Flu pandemic, premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Short Documentary at Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. He has also been active as a podcaster, producing/hosting the 4-part series Polarities, about the intersection of religion and social change. 

His most recent film, the mid-length documentary The Knife Thrower’s Daughter is set to premiere in 2026. The film tells the story of a woman’s winding, surreal and tragic past growing up as part of a performing family in a Wild West Show, drawing on home videos, animation, archival ephemera and reenactments.   

As an archival producer and researcher, he has assisted in locating and licensing archival material, fact-checking and providing visual references. His work can be seen in several television series and documentaries, covering pop culture history, technology, and politics, and screened at Sundance, Berlinale and broadcast on CBC and Discovery Channel.

He has also been active in live theatre and performance, with live video mixing and multimedia projections for multiple stage shows in Seoul, as well as for the Toronto-based band Joyful Joyful. In a past and future life, he remains active as a journalist and critic, with bylines in NOW Magazine, Maisonneuve, and the now deceased music website Cokemachineglow. His work has taken him from South Korea to Myanmar to the Sonoran Desert.