Although born in the USA, Thom Fitzgerald made his mark in the cinema of his adopted homeland of Canada. Born in Westchester County, New York and raised primarily in New Jersey, he settled in NYC to attend Cooper Union on scholarship. While on an exchange program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Fitzgerald decided to stay. His 1990 student film "The Movie of the Week" received a prize at the Atlantic Film Festival and after graduating, the neophyte divided his time between making short films (including several experimental ones) and performing with the Charlatan Theatre Collective in production like "Bed & (maybe) Breakfast." Fitzgerald began writing the script for his first feature, the superb gem-like "The Hanging Garden" in 1994 and spent several years securing the financing. The film is a surreal examination of a dysfunctional family centering on Sweet William, the once overweight now thin and openly gay son who returns after ten-years for his sister's wedding. As Fitzgerald explained to Ted Loos in THE NEW YORK TIMES (May 10, 1998), "It's about a family that got cruelly and ironically stuck together on this planet, and figuring out how to love one another." After its debut at the Toronto Film Festival (where it nabbed the People's Choice award), "The Hanging Garden" proved to be a mainstream hit in Canada, earning 11 Genie nominations and taking home four awards, including Best Screenplay and the Claude Jutra Prize for its debuting director. It premiered in the USA at the Sundance Film Festival where it earned favorable attention and was picked up for distribution by MGM. Fitzgerald followed with the quasi-documentary "Beefcake" (1999), which interwove real and fictional accounts of men who posed for muscle magazines in the 1950s and 60s.