National Film Board names Tina Ouellette executive producer of Western Documentary Unit
Film veteran steps into the role as Shirley Vercruysse begins her retirement after an 11-year term
Tina Ouellette. Photo by Bruce Alcock
TINA OUELLETTE HAS OFFICIALLY been appointed executive producer of the National Film Board’s Western Documentary Unit.
Shirley Vercruysse, who has held the position since 2014, announced her retirement in April after an 11-year term championing Western Canadian and Indigenous stories; she has stayed onboard to complete her current projects and facilitate the transition. Ouellette will take the reins October 1 and will work alongside current producers Teri Snelgrove, Coty Savard, and Chehala Leonard.
Vancouver’s Ouellette is a maven of film, television, and digital media production. She served as a producer for design and animation studio Global Mechanic from 2001 to 2005, then as executive producer from 2006 to 2025. During that time, she worked on science documentaries ranging from Frozen in Time (which aired on CBC’s The Nature of Things) to Hunt for the Oldest DNA (for Nova on PBS). Her roots with the NFB run deep; she has served as producer on several of local filmmaker Bruce Alcock’s NFB coproductions, including Vive la Rose in 2009 and the mobile experience Far Away from Far Away in 2020.
The NFB’s Western Documentary Unit produces and coproduces diverse documentaries by filmmakers who are based in B.C., Yukon, Northwest Territories, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Offerings follow linear storylines and range in length from shorts to full features. The unit typically has 15 projects in development at a time.
Among the works recently released through the Western Documentary Unit was Cree filmmaker Jules Koostachin’s WaaPaKe, which screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2023; in our review, we described how the work depicts the impact of intergenerational trauma through on-camera interviews with five Indigenous folks, noting that its “unwavering openness, though heartbreaking at times, reveals threads of hope”.
The unit’s other recent releases include Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again, which screened at this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival, and Brishkay Ahmed’s In the Room, which you can read about in Stir’s just-released Fall Arts Guide. Print copies are available at JJ Bean locations and arts venues around Metro Vancouver. 
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