“The cinematography ranges from epic to intimate...”
Christian Bielz is an award-winning cinematographer working across fiction and documentary. His work has screened at TIFF, Hot Docs, Fantasia, and festivals worldwide, and has aired on major networks and platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and CBC.
Christian’s recent feature thriller, Out Come the Wolves hit theatres in 2024. Directed by Adam MacDonald, it stars Missy Peregrym (FBI), Joris Jarsky, and Damon Runyan. The project continues a long-standing collaboration with MacDonald, following the occult thriller Pyewacket (TIFF 2017) and the survival hit Backcountry (TIFF 2014).
In 2023, two documentaries Christian shot premiered at Hot Docs.
• Cynara — a haunting legal investigation into the conviction of a mother whose disabled daughter died under mysterious circumstances (dir. Sherien Barsoum)
• The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain — the strange true story of the pathologist who secretly removed Einstein’s brain during autopsy (dir. Michelle Shephard)
These two films garnered a combined seven nominations at the 2024 Canadian Screen Awards.
Christian’s work on the Amazon Prime series The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith (dir. Nathalie Bibeau) earned him a 2023 CSC Award nomination for Best Cinematography: Documentary Long Format. The four-part series premiered at Hot Docs before launching as the first Amazon Original documentary series in Canada.
In the narrative world, Christian received a 2021 CSC Award for Best Cinematography: Dramatic Short for Bloodshed (dirs. Paolo Mancini & Daniel Watchorn), which premiered at Fantasia and went on to win multiple cinematography awards internationally. That same year, he was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Photography in Drama for Nowhere to Be Found (dir. Thomas Michael).
His work in The Last Walrus (dir. Nathalie Bibeau), a documentary for CBC’s The Nature of Things, was nominated at the 2022 Canadian Screen Awards for Best Cinematography: Documentary or Factual. He also lensed the feature length The Walrus and the Whistleblower, which won the Rogers Audience Award at Hot Docs 2020, placing it on the Oscars shortlist in 2021.
Beyond fiction and docs, Christian’s work in music video landed him a Latin Grammy in 2013 for Eres Tú by Alex Cuba, directed by longtime collaborator Taylor Fox.
