Two Old Women: Team Bios
Heather Rae, Producer
Heather Rae has produced such films as Academy Award nominated Frozen River, Netflix Originals Tallulah starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney, Dude starring Lucy Hale and Austin Butler, festival darling I Believe in Unicorns, award-winning The Dry Land with America Ferrera and and Cannes premiering Bull with Rob Morgan. Most recently Rae produced Fancy Dance starring Oscar-nominee Lily Gladstone, an Apple Film release. Rae has been recognized as one of Variety’s Producers to Watch and won the Piaget and Cinereach Producers Awards. She is a member of the Academy and serves on the Producers Branch Executive Committee as well as a member of the newly formed Producers United. Rae is currently in a First Look deal with Amazon Studios and is an Executive Producer on series, Outer Range starring Josh Brolin. For six years Rae was a Narrative Change Strategist with IllumiNative and throughout her thirty year career has worked to support emerging talent.
Jason Ryle, Producer
Jason Ryle is an independent producer, curator and story editor, and the International Programmer for Australia, New Zealand, and Global Indigenous Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Through his mother, he is Anishinaabe and a member of Obushkudayang/Lake St. Martin First Nation in Manitoba, and has spent his career working within the Indigenous media arts community. From July 2010 to June 2020, Jason was the Executive Director of imagineNATIVE, an Indigenous-run organization mandated to support Indigenous filmmakers and media artists. In this capacity, Jason oversaw all operational and artistic activities of the annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the world’s largest showcase of Indigenous screen content. From 2013 until 2020, he was an Advisor for Indigenous films at the Berlinale, and from 2015 to 2020 he oversaw the Indigenous Cinema stand at the European Film Market. In February 2021, Jason received the Clyde Gilmour Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. The award is bestowed to Canadians whose work has in some way enriched the understanding and appreciation of film in their native country.
Sheldon Chau, Cinematographer
Born in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, Sheldon developed a passion for movies as a child when his dad brought home Jackie Chan films via a local laserdisc rental store. Later as a teenager, he discovered that movies went beyond entertainment when both his drama teacher and artist uncle recommended films from the Criterion Collection. After college, Sheldon made a short documentary in which he interviewed his father and learned of his parents’ harrowing journey as part of the Chinese diaspora of boat people who fled Vietnam in the aftermath of the war; this cemented his commitment to storytelling. Sheldon holds a BA from UC Irvine in Film Studies and an MFA from NYU Tisch in filmmaking.
Sheldon has screened at top festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice, and Berlin. His recent credits as cinematographer include: Pooja, Sir - a Nepalese police thriller that premiered at this year’s Venice FF; Demba - a Senegalese drama that premiered at this year’s Berlinale; Nafi’s Father - Senegal’s official entry to the 2021 Oscars about two warring brothers; and Enmity Djinn - the Mauritanian chapter of Netflix’s African Folktales Reimagined anthology. Sheldon is the winner of the ARRI Volker Bahnemann Award for Cinematography, a Visual Communications AWC Fellow, and part of the ASC Vision Mentorship program. Sheldon has specialized in shooting internationally and balancing both large- and guerrilla-sized crews. He loves learning new cultures and history, and continues to seek stories that are evocative, personal, and emotionally resonant.