Dorothea Mitchell (1877–1976), also known as Lady Lumberjack, was a pioneer filmmaker in Canada. Mitchell co-founded the first amateur film group in Canada, the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society, in 1929, and made three feature-length films: A Race For Ties (1929), Sleep Inn Beauty (1929), and The Fatal Flower (1930 but left unfinished). The society's first film, A Race For Ties, has the distinction of being the first amateur feature length film in Canada.
Mitchell was also the first single woman granted a homestead in the province of Ontario in 1911, served as station master at Silver Mountain Station, and ran a sawmill, which earned her her nickname. She published an autobiography, Lady Lumberjack, in 1968.
Early life
Dorothea Mitchell was born in England in 1877.
Biography
Mitchell emigrated to Canada on her own in 1904 for employment opportunities, first landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia. For example, when cheated out of $130 in her sawmill business, she single-handedly took the perpetrator to court and won, eventually using the story of a crooked timber dealer as inspiration when writing her first film, A Race For Ties.
In her review of Lady Lumberjack, the annotated collection of works edited by Michel S. Beaulieu and Ronald N. Harpelle, Cheryl Desroches states of Mitchell: "If she found living in the woods at times inconvenient, she would have laughed at the thought of herself as soft. Lady Lumberjack is laden with evidence of Mitchell's ability to defy notions, typical of the era, of appropriate female behaviour. [...] Mitchell's experiences fostered a strong belief that women were capable of anything men could do."