Niobe Thompson is an Emmy© Award-winning filmmaker, Fellow of the Explorers Club, and founder of Victoria-based Handful of Films. A Cambridge-trained anthropologist and Russianist, he is known for genre-defying documentaries that reach back to our human origins, explore the mysteries of evolution, and tackle the environmental dilemmas of the Anthropocene.
Career
Anthropologist Niobe Thompson made the jump from university research to full-time filmmaking in 2009 and quickly established a reputation for taking his audiences on wild adventures to remote locations, while making a laboratory of his body and mind.
After following the earliest human journeys into the Americas, from Arctic Russia to Greenland to South America, for the CBC docs Inuit Odyssey (2009) and Code Breakers (2010), he turned to the mysteries of human evolution. In the 2011 doc The Perfect Runner, Niobe trained with elite Ethiopian distance athletes and ran Canada’s 125-km Death Race as an experiment in human endurance. For the 2015 series Great Human Odyssey, he learned to free dive to explore the lives of Badjao sea nomads and joined Chukchi reindeer nomads on a winter migration. In the 2018 series Equus – Story of the Horse, Niobe rode with horse nomads around the world, from the Arabian desert to Mongolia’s Altai Mountains to northern Siberia, and explored horse intelligence with laboratory scientists, horse speed with Blackfoot Indian Relay racers, and horse agility with Canadian horsemanship champions.
Without formal training in film, Niobe learned how to produce, write and direct documentaries from a series of accomplished mentors, including veteran NFB filmmaker Tom Radford, verité specialist Rosie Dransfeld, and decorated Métis cinematographer Daron Donahue. When Equus – Story of the Horse won three Canadian Screen Awards in 2019, it was the third time that Niobe had received the Rob Stewart Award, Canada’s highest honour in science-and-nature documentary (along with Great Human Odyssey, 2015, and Code Breakers, 2010). After two previous Emmy© nominations (Transplanting Hope, 2019, and Great Human Odyssey, 2016), Niobe accepted the 2025 Emmy© Award for “Outstanding Science & Technology Documentary” on behalf of a large team for the feature-length doc Hunt for the Oldest DNA. His films have received many other international awards, including at the Sundance Film Festival, the Jackson Hole Media Science Festival, the Innsbruck Nature Film Festival, and Academic Film Olomouc. Three of his short docs have toured the world with the Banff Mountain Film Festival Tour: Fast Horse, Boy Nomad, and The Long Today.
In collaboration with Canadian composer Darren Fung, Niobe has presented select documentaries as orchestral performances to live audiences. With Fung and composer Jonathan Kawchuk, he has presented master classes in live-recorded scoring for documentaries for the Screen Composers’ Guild of Canada. He has delivered keynote addresses at film festivals, writers’ festivals, and teachers’ conventions, and has served on juries for the Emmy© Awards, the Canadian Screen Awards, the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, and the Innsbruck Film Festival. He has been elected an International Fellow of the Explorers Club.
The son of a landscape painter and wooden canoe builder, Niobe grew up in a remote Cree community in northern Canada and worked as a forest fire fighter before pursuing Russian and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He and his Danish wife lived in Arctic Russia and Denmark before moving to Western Canada in 2006 to raise their two daughters. After founding Clearwater Documentary in Edmonton with veteran NFB producer Tom Radford in 2007, founded Handful of Films in 2018.
Now based in Victoria, British Columbia, Niobe leads story research and production for a small team of specialist science-and-nature filmmakers, with documentaries in development on ancient DNA discoveries, the impact of infectious disease on human evolution, the mystery of chimpanzee intelligence and the real-life world of Canadian mountain guides.
