Founded by filmmaker and science host Niobe Thompson, Handful of Films is a collective of Canadian documentarians completely committed to each project, drawing on our passion for storytelling and a nerd-forward fascination for science and discovery.
Our Company
Our documentaries bring to life episodes in the human journey, from our evolutionary origins to the complexity of life in the present, explore the frontiers of scientific discovery, and celebrate the wonders of the natural world. Our shared history stretches back two decades, when Niobe Thompson left university research, joined with veteran western Canadian filmmaker Tom Radford, and founded Clearwater Documentary in Edmonton. Later relaunching the company as Handful of Films and relocating to Canada’s West Coast, Niobe and his colleagues have since produced much more than a handful of documentaries, ranging from short form passion projects to international broadcast series.
“The scientific equivalent of a creation story for humankind. Indescribable, but brilliant. Part eye-popping nature program, part fascinating anthropology.”
The Globe & Mail on Great Human Odyssey
In our first decade, Niobe combined the roles of producer, director and host, developing a unique style of adventure and science storytelling the Globe & Mail called “indescribable, but brilliant.” As an on-screen anthropologist, Niobe’s early documentaries included The Perfect Runner (2011), Code Breakers (2010), and Inuit Odyssey (2009). He later wrote and hosted two limited mini-series for CBC, PBS and other international broadcasters: Great Human Odyssey (2015) and Equus – Story of the Horse (2019). Human Odyssey reached audiences in 52 countries, won two Canadian Screen Awards, including the Rob Stewart Award for Best Science and Nature Documentary, and an Emmy© Nomination. Equus won three Canadian Screen Awards, including our third Rob Stewart Award, and remains one of the most popular docs on PBS Nature. Working with Composer Darren Fung, both series were relaunched for live performances with symphony orchestras throughout North America.
"An exhaustive scientific quest through 11 countries, backed by gorgeous footage and narrative magnificence… epic!”
Edmonton Journal on Equus – Story of the Horse
In 2016, we collaborated with the National Film Board of Canada and ID:Productions to create two related films on organ transplant medicine: Vital Bonds and Memento Mori. Niobe’s crew was the first in broadcast history to capture, with the consent of family, the death of a patient and their decision to donate his organs. The project was instrumental in the campaign to improve organ donation rates in Canada, won the Special Jury Prize at the 2018 Jackson Hole Science Media Awards, and was nominated for an Emmy© Award (retitled for PBS as Transplanting Hope).
Handful of Films also produces short docs. Fast Horse, which opened the 2019 Sundance Film Festival won the Special Jury Award for Direction, explores the white-knuckle sport of Indian Relay, “North America’s original extreme sport,” through the eyes of the Blackfoot cowboy Allison Red Crow. The 2019 Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour selected both Fast Horse and our short doc Boy Nomad, which follows a 9-year-old Kazakh boy as he joins his father on his first winter migration through Mongolia’s Altai Mountains. In 2020, our short film The Long Today, a deeply personal exploration of a father-and-son relationship on a gruelling wilderness canoe trip, was selected at Banff, Kendall, Vancouver, and many other adventure-film festivals around the world.
After relocating to the Canadian West Coast in 2020, Handful of Films joined a new community of filmmakers and develop new approaches to documentary storytelling. We teamed up with Australia’s Genepool Productions to produce the feature-length doc Carbon – The Unauthorised Biography, filming with remote crews around the world in the midst of the COVID pandemic and featuring extensive animations by Vancouver-based Global Mechanic. Carbon aired on CBC, ABC and ARTE in 2022, and screened at many environmental and science film festivals around the world.
Continuing a long tradition of producing one-off docs for CBC’s flagship nature-and-science program The Nature of Things, Handful of Films produced three recent films for the strand. True Survivors (2023), an exploration of human survival through deep time from an indigenous perspective, marked the handover of the official hosting role from legendary conservationist David Suzuki to his daughter, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki. In Animal Pride (2025), queer BC naturalist Connell Bradwell explored queer behaviour in the natural world, ending his journey with same-sex penguin rearing in Antarctica. Frozen in Time (2025) tells the story of renowned Canadian paleontologist Natalia Rybczynski, who suffered a life-changing brain injury before rebuilding her career to return to High Arctic fieldwork to discover the canid ancestor of dogs.
“A mind-boggling search for the world’s oldest DNA… this fascinating documentary digs deep for genetic secrets.”
The Guardian, on Hunt for the Oldest DNA
Handful of Films reached new heights with the Emmy© Award winning success of the 2024 feature documentary Hunt for the Oldest DNA. For this film, Director Niobe Thompson followed the two-decade quest of Danish evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev, as he sought to recover and sequence DNA millions of years older than any ever recovered. A portrait of a maverick scientist, pursued by his inner demons to push the boundaries of science and prove his critics wrong, Hunt premiered in Copenhagen at CPH:DOX and on PBS NOVA, before airing on BBC4, France TV, Germany’s ZDF, Canada’s Knowledge Network and many other broadcasters around the world.
Handful of Films is now developing new documentaries, including a first-ever attempt to film a reclusive population of chimpanzees in Tanzania, whose behaviour may reveal new insights into primate intelligence, an exploration of how infectious diseases in our past have shaped the human genome, and could explain the epidemic of auto-immune disease today, and a series following the work of gene hunter Eske Willerslev, as he endeavours to harvest ancient genes to transform food crops for a warming future. We also really want to make a series about the unknown, real-world life of Canadian mountain guides – that would be fun!
