Career
Dorfman"s first major film is Swerve (1998), a film about friends on a road trip. Her feature film Parsley Days (2000), is a comedy about a young woman seeking an abortion after accidentally conceiving a child with her boyfriend, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her second feature Love that Boy featured Nadia Litz as a sexually immature type-A university student who develops a close relationship with her teenage neighbour after failing to find a boyfriend.
The film also featured Ellen Page in a small role.
lieutenant premiered at the 2003 Atlantic Film Festival. In 2009 Dorfman used a grant from BravoFACT to create an animated short film based on a poem by Tanya Davis titled How to be Alone.
The film received airplay in 2009 but in 2010, after Dorfman posted the piece on YouTube it went viral, gaining over a million views in a few months and gained accolades from Roger Ebert and The Atlantic. Dorfman continued to experiment with animation with Flawed, a 2010 short animated documentary combining stop-motion animation and hand-painted images.
Flawed was produced in Halifax by Annette Clarke for the National Film Board of Canada.
In 2014 Dorfman returned to feature film making with Heartbeat, a film about a young woman struggling to overcome her fears to become a musician. The film starred musician Tanya Davis and premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema section.
