After graduating, Spring wrote poetry and worked in advertising, journalism, radio and television. She conducted radio interviews of the Canadian poet
Irving Layton, directed
This Land is People, a TV series introducing viewers to up-and-coming Canadians from all walks of life, including
Peter Lougheed,
Sinclair Stevens and
Gustavo da Roza, and co-directed with
David Rimmer Know Place, an experimental short documentary about an alternative school.
Madeleine Is ... In 1969, Spring received a $15,000 grant from the
Canadian Film Development Corporation, to produce a feature-length film in Canada. She co-wrote and directed the resulting 90 minute film,
Madeleine Is ... (1971), a segment of which, released as a short feature under the name
Madeleine, won an award at the
Vancouver International Film Festival in 1970. With a total budget of $100,000, the film was filmed in
Vancouver, and starred Vancouver actress
Nicola Lipman in the eponymous role of a young aspiring painter from Quebec who moves to Vancouver, where she is involved in an abusive relationship with a political radical and an unfulfilling relationship with a businessman/nerd, before discovering her own identity as an artist. It premiered in April 1971 in Toronto and Montreal, and in May 1971 in Vancouver, but closed in Toronto after just one week. While the film was feted as the "First movie by woman film-maker" (in fact it was the first since
Nell Shipman in 1919), reviews were mixed. One reviewer stated that Spring "introduces a character or sets up a mood then doesn't sustain or develop it. The result is a picture of little artistic or entertainment merit, relying on a lot of clichéd outdoor shots to pad a slight story and thin characterisations." On the other hand, one reviewer recognised "the political and psychological naivety, which at times is downright embarrassing" but found that "Nevertheless, the film was better than the response it got. ... Spring's film achieves something fairly difficult: it takes people of five varying social types .... and never once treats them as stereotypes or without generosity. .... There's a straightforward warmth to this film, and it seems to come from its direction". From the early 2000s, critics brought a new perspective to
Madeleine Is ..., with one stating that "Spring's film has a few very powerful moments ... and some strikingly expressionistic shots of
downtown Vancouver. But regardless of its uneven technical and artistic quality, I would argue that the indifference from which the film has suffered results mainly from two factors: its politics and its style." After evaluating industry voluntary self-regulation, the CRTC instituted a policy on sex-role stereotyping in broadcasting in 1986. The Canadian experience was influential in policy development in other countries: Spring presented in 1988 in Australia at a public forum on the portrayal of women in advertising, during which she was interviewed by New Zealand media. In 1994, Spring led a workshop at the Women Empowering Communication conference in
Bangkok, Thailand, at which a plan to monitor media worldwide on a single day was conceived; the first
Global Media Monitoring Project occurred in 1995, with 71 countries participating. At the 1995
UNESCO International Symposium
Women and the Media: Access to Expression and Decision-Making, she was a member of the Canadian Organizing Committee, the Drafting Committee, and co-presented on 'Overview of Common Obstacles and Strategies to Expression in all Regions'. Spring worked as a Communications Consultant for the Canadian National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), and in January 2000, travelled to
China to conduct workshops on the information dissemination techniques used by women's groups in Canada."
Film-making companies By late 1973, Spring was a member of feminist film-making company, Fromunder Films, which was organized to produce films and television programs exclusively about women. She later founded Making Waves Productions. In 1995, she produced
Voices and Visions, a documentary series from the
UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. In 1996, she produced
Breaking the Silence: Stories from AIDS Activists in Southern Africa, which won two awards at the Ottawa Reel Awards in 1996. For the year 2000, Spring had hoped to make a 13-part series on Canadian women, but without funding or TV network interest, instead developed a one hour "docudramady",
20th Century Gals (According to Babe), which explored the women's movement of the 20th century. In 2005, Spring co-produced
Our bodies...their battleground, a documentary about the sexual violence crisis facing women and girls in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and
Liberia. It was shown at the inaugural United Nations
Documentary Film Festival, and was "the only film to receive a unanimous top vote by all judges". Spring currently lives in
Wakefield, Quebec, with her partner of 30 years, Canadian diplomat
Carolyn McAskie. == Filmography ==