If you’re aware of Nathan Fielder, you’re probably aware he, in his resoundingly patriotic words, “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades.”
Which — despite the intentionally ridiculous way it’s read out in the intro to his show Nathan for You — is true: The Canadian comedian really did get his bachelor of commerce at the University of Victoria, before eventually transitioning to that show, known for its farcically absurd business advice.
It might seem random to connect Canadian business school with obsessive investigations and near-incomparable success. But that background established a pattern for the Vancouver-born Fielder. Since the earliest days of his comedy career, Fielder has built what basically amounts to an entire field of study around the fickle nature of truth.
Practically all his work has been undergirded by this concept, from his early days at CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes to the more mind-bendingly bizarre The Curse and The Rehearsal and all the way to the world’s hottest documentary right now: the Elizabeth Holmes-focused You Can See Everything, which released last Friday.
But as odd as those releases seem, they have created something of a cottage industry around Fielder, and the belief he is turning the format of documentary on its head. The film’s run-and-gun-style employed an incredibly small team of roughly seven on-site crew members, a significant number of which, like Fielder, hail from Canada. And given the tradition of documentary in this country — as well as the fact that this time, he’s not doing it alone — the movie’s success may not seem so odd after all.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes appears in a still from Nathan Fielder’s mindbending documentary You Can See Everything. (A24)
Unreal success
The most prominent Canadian of You Can See Everything is, of course, Fielder himself. He first rose to fame with his show, Nathan for You, a Comedy Central expansion of a segment that he established on 22 Minutes.
That series was what led the documentary’s co-director, Lance Oppenheim, to approach Fielder about working on a project together in the first place, according to an interview with Vulture.
From there, Oppenheim and Fielder brought in their respective collaborators. On Fielder’s end, that included Adam Locke-Norton, the editor with whom he first collaborated for shorts like Morris, Flashback and Eves, released on YouTube in 2006.
Meanwhile, Oppenheim brought in his own team, supported by the Great White North. That included Ottawa-born producer Tatiana Bears, who told CBC News she flew to the location just 24 hours after getting Oppenheim’s call to start shooting. There was also director of photography David Bolen, a Toronto native who was the cinematographer for Oppenheim’s narrative debut Primetime and his prior, self-styled “documentary fantasy” creations Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven.
Bolen’s camera was a particularly mind-bending aspect of You Can See Everything, fuelling much of its Oscars buzz.
Further down the line, there are more names: Saskatchewan’s Katina Danabassis was in charge of costuming. Described by Vogue Philippines as “one of A24’s most radical collaborators,” her oeuvre stretches from fellow Canadian Celine Song’s Materialists and Past Lives to Fielder’s The Curse, as well as this year’s The Drama.
And then Ontario filmmaker Stephen Coleman — who previously worked on A24 projects Materialists, The Drama and the upcoming Jesse Eisenberg film The Debut — lent his hand as second assistant director.
They are now among those listed in A24’s “for your consideration” Oscars campaign: Danabassis for best costume design, Bolen for best cinematography, Bears for the coveted best picture and Locke-Norton for best editing. Fielder and Oppenheim are submitted for best director.
A24 is also submitting You Can See Everything in the documentary category, but it may be angling for a record with best picture: If successful, it would become the first documentary to garner a nomination in that category.
Canadians in Hollywood
Canadians finding their way into Hollywood productions is by no means a new phenomenon. The United States has offered a fertile and appetizing landing pad to well-trained anglophone Canadian creatives without a thriving homegrown industry of their own. But A24, which funded You Can See Everything, has been establishing itself as both a home for, and source of, Canadian talent.
The distribution studio behind films like Backrooms, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Moonlight is infamously experimental, having enough faith in Fielder’s vision that it signed a contract allowing him to cancel the project at any time, consequence-free.
Early this year, the studio released Undertone, the ultra low-budget, Toronto-shot horror from Montreal director Ian Tuason that earned more than $20 million US worldwide. It also nabbed the Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony, directed by Canada’s Matt Johnson. That film had a surprisingly strong $5-million US wide debut, following a prior limited release, and eventually grossed nearly $20 million US worldwide.
That incursion hasn’t been without friction. Along with a perceived shift away from risk-taking indie fare, A24 was recently in hot water over pulling the Canadian-directed Tony from an independent Toronto theatre over a “clearance issue.” That practice, orchestrated and overseen by distributors but kept alive by large cinema chains’ superior market share, keeps smaller theatres from being able to play the same film as nearby larger ones.
Still, a supposed turn to Canadian talent could make awards sense. And when it comes to success at the Academy, there is one place Canada has historically shown considerable strength: the world of documentary filmmaking.
The term “documentary” itself was coined by critic John Grierson in 1926, who would go on to create Canada’s National Film Board. Meanwhile, the Quebec-set 1922 film Nanook of the North is widely cited as the first feature-length documentary. Though many scenes in the latter were staged, the early connections have bloomed into recurrent Oscars success.
A Canadian documentary feature — producer Guy Glover’s The Stratford Adventure — was first nominated at the 1955 ceremony. The country’s first documentary feature win came in 1976 with The Man Who Skied Down Everest, followed by CBC’s Just Another Missing Kid in 1983 and most recently for a wholly Canadian production with Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got. It tied for a win in 1987.
Nominations are more frequent: as recently as Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Sugarcane (co-directed with Emily Kassie) for the 2025 ceremony and Nisha Pahuja’s To Kill a Tiger at the 2024 awards. Numerous other Canadian-crafted films have also made their way to the Academy Awards, such as Daniel Roher’s 2022 film Navalny, or the 2002 Michael Donovan co-produced Bowling for Columbine.
In the best documentary short category, Canadians are even more representative: Since 2011, at least 10 films by Canadians have been nominated. Of those, four have won. Conversely, no wholly Canadian movie has ever been nominated for or won best picture — though Canadian filmmakers James Cameron and Paul Haggis have won for Titanic and Crash, respectively.
In the international category, in which Canada is more routinely competitive, only Denys Arcand has won: for The Barbarian Invasions in 2004 (the category was then called best foreign language film).
