John Paskievich is an award-winning filmmaker who has written, directed, produced and photographed an array of documentaries. His most recent film, Unspeakable (2006), examines the nature, history and treatment of a speech impediment that affects about 1% of the world's population regardless of language, culture, class or ethnicity.

John Paskievich is a person who stutters. He also narrates and is an active participant in the film. His story and the stories of others in the film are poignant, funny, angry and courageous, providing eloquent testimony to what it means to live imprisoned in what the poet W.H. Auden called "the tower of stutter."

In December 2006, Unspeakable won a special jury prize at the 2006 Whistler Film Festival, for what jurors, director Norman Jewison, actress Lisa Ray, and director, writer and Anagram Pictures founding partner Andrew Currie, called a "touching, humourous and intimate portrait of facing the world as a stutterer."

He co-directed The Gift of Diabetes (2005) with Brion Whitford, an Ojibway man with advanced diabetes who struggles to reapair his health with the Medicine Wheel, a Native healing tool.

Paskievich released My Mother's Village  in 2001, a journey into his personal experience of exile and its impact on the human spirit, The Gypsies of Svinia (1998), which he directed and photographed, offered an unprecedented look into the everyday lives of the Roma who have been relegated to the farthest, most grotesque margins of society during Eastern Europe's painful transition from communism to democracy. 

If Only I Were an Indian (1996), which Paskievich directed and produced, accompanies three aboriginal elders from Manitoba on a voyage to the Czech Republic as they relive their past through the native rituals and costumes adopted by their European admirers.  The Bly Sky Pictures NFB co-production screened at festivals across North America and Europe, won a prize in Paris, and was broadcast on TVO, Vision and PBS.  Sedna: The Making of a Myth (1992), an NFB Zemma Pictures co-production which Paskievich directed and produced, follows three Inuit carvers, their families and a carver from the south, as they work and camp out on a spectacular outcrop of marble on Baffin Island.  The film won prizes at festivals in Columbus, Ohio, Toronto and Winnipeg and was broadcast across Canada and on PBS in the U.S.

The Old Believers (1988) is an extraordinary film about a family in an isolated northern Alberta community who see themselves as the last Christians left on the face of the Earth.  Paskievich wrote, directed and produced the NFB film that went on to win prizes across North America and was broadcast on the CBC, PBS and various European networks.  The award-winning Ted Baryluk's Grocery (1982), a wistful rendering of a shopkeeper and his neighbourhood, which Paskievich wrote, directed and co-edited, was presented at numerous festivals, including Cannes.

Paskievich's other films include The Actor (1990), The Price of Daily Bread (1985), and Cityscapes-Winnipeg. Paskievich also served as part of a 5-person directorial team on the 1987 IMAX production, Heartland.

Born in Austria, Paskievich immigrated to Canada at age 5. He studied at the University of Winnipeg and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto.  An accomplished stills photographer as well as filmmaker, his photographs have been exhibited at prestigious galleries and museums across Canada.  His photographs have also been published in four books: A Place Not Our Own, Waiting for the Ice Cream Man... A Prison Journal, Urban Indians and A Voiceless Song.