What Escapes Production

We are committed to impassioned and incisive storytelling, challenging people and ideas, and working in complex environments around the globe. We make non-fiction films and series for a range of platforms, as well as for theatrical distribution. 

The company was founded by Andréa Schmidt as an extension of her commitment to journalism and filmmaking, in order to facilitate collaborations with other media-makers.

What Escapes Production is based in Toronto, Canada. 

Andréa Schmidt

Andréa Schmidt is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker whose work often focuses on geopolitical crises, political conflicts, and social movements. She has covered stories in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Her work has appeared on The Weekly, a documentary series by The New York Times broadcast on FX and Hulu. She directed and produced “El Chapo’s Son: The Siege of Culiacán,” which was awarded a News and Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story in a News Magazine (2020).

As a producer and director for Al Jazeera English's Emmy and Peabody Award-winning current affairs documentary show, Fault Lines, she helped establish the show’s distinctive voice over 25 episodes. She covered Haiti after the earthquake, Somalia during the famine, Honduras after the coup, Mexico gripped by the war for drugs, Iraq after almost a decade of U.S. presence, among other stories. She was a producer and writer of “Haiti: Six Months On”, the Fault Lines documentary that garnered Al Jazeera its first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award (2012). 

As a newsroom leader, Andréa has worked in a number of senior editorial and management roles. She helped launch AJ+, Al Jazeera’s innovative youth-focused digital channel, as the executive producer of short documentaries, and led the development of the channel’s mobile coverage of news events. She has also worked as an executive, showrunner, and supervising producer of docuseries, and as the managing editor of a podcast company. 

She serves on the executive board of ACOS (A Culture Of Safety) Alliance, a coalition of news organizations, freelance journalist associations and press freedom NGOs working together to champion safe and responsible journalistic practices.