ABOUT BLACK OPIATE
Film and TV Production Company Specializing in Genre and True Crime
Kate Kroll
Specializing in both scripted and unscripted production, award-winning filmmaker, Kate is passionate about impactful storytelling and breathtaking visuals.
Kate is the recipient of the Canadian Media Producers Association Kevin Tierney EmergingProducer Award for her work on the dramatic comedy, 'Portraits from a Fire' (Crave/Photon Films) which had a theatrical release on 33 screens across Canada. Notable work includes the CTV reality dating series, 'Farming For Love'; the CBC Gem series,'Future Futures'; Thecritically acclaimed documentary,'No Fun City' (Super Channel); the documentary, Path of Pilgrims (Vision TV); the Prism Prize nominated T anya T agaq music video, 'Retribution'; and theand experimental docu-drama, 'Rangwang.’
Kate has garnered awards, grants, and mentorships from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media; Women in the Director’s Chair; the DGC; WIFTV; Canada Council for the Arts; the NFB; and BravoFACT. Her work has screened at TIFF , VIFF , ImagineNative, DOXA; and has been broadcast on Crave, CBC, Super Channel, Knowledge Network, Vision TV, APTN, and Air Canada.She holds a certificate in Entertainment Law from Y ork University Osgoode Hall, is an accomplished Pro-Wrestler, and is president of her boutique production company, Black Moon Media.
Karen Lam
Karen has worked full-time in the film and television industry since 2000. Starting her career as a producer and entertainment lawyer, Karen was one of the architects of the British Columbia tax credit program before being recruited by PwC accounting firm to assist with creating tax shelters for the US studio clients.
Since leaving the world of film finance, Karen has written and directed ten short horror films, three music videos, series directed two seasons of the true crime series Very Bad Men for Discovery+, a web series Mythos (2015) for TELUS, and five feature-length films, including Stained (2010), Evangeline (2013) and The Curse of Willow Song (2020), which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in September 2020. The film won the award for Best British Columbia Feature Film, and Karen received a Best Director award at the British Columbia Leo Awards (2021).
Karen has also written television scripts for SYFY and Netflix on the premiere seasons of Van Helsing and Ghost Wars, where she was able to help create and create the characters for each series. In 2021, Karen directed the seventh instalment in the Bring It On cheerleading franchise, a Halloween horror special titled Bring It On: Cheer Or Die (2022) that premiered on SYFY in October, and is available for viewing on Crave in Canada (Amazon and Hulu in the rest of the world.). The Curse of Willow Song is available for viewing worldwide, released jointly by Red Water Entertainment (Canada) and Uncork’d Entertainment (world).
Karen just directed two projects in 2024 based on her original scripts: Armageddon Road is a darkly comedic supernatural road trip, set in 1970s Las Vegas, with a sly riff on the Biblical Book of Revelation. The second project is Karen’s tenth short horror film, Mrs. Chang’s Perfect Teeth, which won the Director’s Guild of Canada BC “Established Director Greenlight Award” in late 2023. Both films are premiering in film festival screenings throughout the fall of 2025 and will be distributed internationally in the spring of 2026.