PAULA TIBERIUS

BIOGRAPHY

I'm a screenwriter, filmmaker and musician creating art in the hopes of making the world a better place. One of my most important career achievements is saving a teenage girl stuck in the suburbs with no friends, completely depressed. She wrote to tell me that she watched my movie Goldirocks and was inspired to stop harming herself and start a band instead.

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Raised by two artist scholars, I was taught from a young age to question authority, value craft and live with purpose. I fell in love with punk rock and the Detroit rock sound in high school, an aesthetic that grounds my 'be who you are' philosophy. I learned to make films at the University of Toronto's Hart House Film Board and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) where I edited my first three short films (Busk, Killing Time & Oxanna) on an Intercine flatbed machine the old school way - cutting film strips and taping them back together. For all its efficiency, digital film editing's got nothing on celluloid. When a single edit takes two minutes to execute, you learn to think long and hard about how each cut changes the story.

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Growing up in the Toronto rock scene and playing in the band Sticky Rice, it’s no surprise that my first film was about the power of music embodied by a girl who picks up a guitar. I am so grateful that I got to make a feature film at that time – the experience strengthened my sense of community and my belief that the joy of filmmaking is not just storytelling, but also collaboration. After Goldirocks, I moved to Los Angeles and began to focus more seriously on the craft of writing, developing a slate of projects you can read about on my Film & TV page.

Recent produced screenplays I’ve written have been featured on Netflix, UPtv, CityTV, Superchannel, CBC, Amazon and Peacock. My script Snowbound for Christmas made it to #4 on Netflix during the 2021 holiday season. My television shows in development include Idyllwild, a drama about a special ranch run by veterans that helps people heal through the power of horses (short film version of the pilot shooting October 2023) and Rotten to the Core, a family comedy about a queer indigenous ex-punk rocker mom who becomes the subject of a documentary that forces her to reconcile her past. My feature film slate includes a music-driven family drama Shelter Song and a feature comedy about a fallen tech executive, called Electric Avenue.
 

I write and record music with my husband Richard Duguay at our home studio, Into The Black, in Los Angeles, and recently directed a multi-part music video campaign for his album Beautiful Decline. My children's album Be Who You Are (2015) is a 14-track collection of music and spoken word that encourages young people to make art and question everything. I sell my linocut art prints on Etsy for fun.