Fahad Ahmed
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A.J. Leitch is a Toronto documentary cinematographer and producer, Producer and DP on the award-winning Searching for Satoshi and a 2026 Canadian Screen Award nominee for The Ozempic Effect, whose lens moves from sports floors to music stages to luxury hotels to one of the decade's biggest health stories.
A Toronto cinematographer whose lens has moved from sports floors to music stages to luxury hotels to one of the biggest health stories of the decade, and the body of work that earned him a Canadian Screen Award nomination.
A.J. Leitch has spent his career pointing a camera at people in the middle of something. A Paralympian mid-run. A band three songs into a set. A person standing on a scale, deciding to change their life. The rooms could not look more different. The instinct underneath them is the same one: get close, stay honest, and let the story tell you where to stand. He describes the work in his own materials as "story-driven filmmaking," and, with a wink, as "serious fun."
This year that instinct put his name on a national stage. The Ozempic Effect: Beyond the Waistline, the documentary he worked on with Paul Kemp Productions for CBC, is nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social/Political Documentary Program at the 2026 Canadian Screen Awards. It is the kind of film that takes a headline everyone thinks they understand, the rise of a drug, and finds the human beings inside it.
What he is actually looking for
Ask Leitch what he is chasing and the answer is not a shot list. "At the core of my work is storytelling," he writes, "understanding what matters most to a client, discovering the emotional truth behind a project, and translating it into visual content that connects with audiences." To him, the strongest visual content is not the footage that merely looks cinematic. It is the footage that makes people feel something.
That standard comes out of his documentary background, and he says it carries into everything he shoots, brand films included: a bias toward authentic moments and real situations over staged ones. It is why his commercial work and his documentary work do not feel like two different people. The luxury hotel suite and the doctor's office get the same question pointed at them. What is true here, and where do I have to stand to catch it.
The film that proved the method
The clearest evidence of how he works is Searching for Satoshi: The Mysterious Disappearance of the Bitcoin Creator. On that 2023 documentary, made by Paul Kemp Productions for CBC, Leitch is credited as Producer and Director of Photography, alongside director Paul Kemp and fellow producer Calvin Hwang. The film followed Kemp on a worldwide hunt for the identity of Bitcoin's vanished creator, the kind of globe-spanning, talking-head-heavy story that lives or dies on how watchable it can make an abstract subject.
It worked. Searching for Satoshi won three Golden Sheaf Awards at the 2024 Yorkton Film Festival, four 2024 Canadian Cinematography Awards (among them Best Documentary Film and Best Photography), and Best Documentary at the Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival, alongside Canadian Screen Award nominations. For a cinematographer, a Best Photography win on a film he shot is about as direct a verdict on the craft as the trade hands out.
That same core team, Kemp and Leitch and Hwang, is now back at the Canadian Screen Awards with The Ozempic Effect.
The lens that follows the story
Leitch runs A.J. Leitch Productions out of the Greater Toronto Area, and the body of work behind it is unusually wide, for clients that include CBC Sports, CBC Music, Sportsnet, the Canadian Olympic Committee, Walmart Canada, and Cineplex. On the sports side, his camera has been on the floor for the Canadian Paralympics, Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, and the Para Snowboard World Championships. On the music side, he has shot some of the most recognizable acts in Canadian music, City and Colour, The Arkells, Charlotte Cardin, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, and others. And there is a whole quieter strand of his work in global hospitality, filming for brands like Four Seasons and Omni hotels, the kind of assignment that has taken him from Toronto to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and London in a single year.
What ties it together is not a genre. It is a way of working. Sports taught him to anticipate a moment a half-second before it happens. Music taught him rhythm, when to hold and when to cut away. Documentary asks for both, plus patience, the willingness to keep rolling until the real thing surfaces. The Ozempic Effect is where all three meet: a story that is part science, part economics, and entirely about people.
Back to the room
Strip away the awards talk and the client list and you are left with the thing he started with: a person in the middle of something, and someone close by who decided that moment was worth keeping. That is the whole job, whether the room is an arena, a stage, a hotel suite, or a clinic. The tools change. What he is looking for, the footage that makes you feel something, does not.
About
A.J. Leitch is a documentary cinematographer and producer based in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, and the founder of A.J. Leitch Productions. He is a 2026 Canadian Screen Award nominee for The Ozempic Effect: Beyond the Waistline (Paul Kemp Productions for CBC), nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social/Political Documentary Program. He was Producer and Director of Photography on Searching for Satoshi: The Mysterious Disappearance of the Bitcoin Creator (2023), which won three Golden Sheaf Awards and four Canadian Cinematography Awards. His broader work spans documentary, sports, music, and global hospitality, including projects with the Canadian Paralympics, Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, Four Seasons and Omni hotels, and artists such as City and Colour, The Arkells, and Charlotte Cardin. Find him at ajleitch.com and on LinkedIn.