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Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
History on parade
Even in the joyful, jittery atmosphere of a film première, a sense of gravity permeated the packed house at the Toronto opening of the documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance on April 24 at Bloor Street's Hot Docs Cinema on the opening night of the Hot Docs Festival. The film justified the feeling. Director Noam Gonick's movie — which has its local première at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on June 28 — is an astonishingly cumulative look at Canada's history of queer activism; the vibe in the house was undoubtedly enhanced by the presence of about 35 of the film's interview participants, many of whom are famous (Svend Robinson, Canada's first MP to come out as gay; Lorraine Segato, lead singer of the Parachute Club; filmmaker John Greyson) and many more who have toiled in relative anonymity in the trenches of the gay rights movement over the past 60 years. 'It's a very unabashed, no-holds-barred love letter to the activists who step off the sidewalk, into the street to change the world they lived in,' Gonick said during an interview after the screening. It is no coincidence that Gonick, the local filmmaker known for Hey, Happy and the Guy Maddin doc Waiting for Twilight, took the helm of the project with a former Winnipegger, producer Justine Pimlott, whose 2024 doc Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, won a Peabody Award last month for best documentary. Winnipeg-based activism is in the blood of both Gonick and Pimlott. Gonick's father is Cy Gonick, a one-time NDP politician and the editor of the socialist magazine Canadian Dimension. 'The apple didn't really fall from far from the tree, it was just a pink apple,' Gonick says. 'My parents did teach me to question authority. I can remember my dad saying to me at an impressionable age, 'Just because he's wearing a cap like that doesn't mean he can tell you what to do.' So yes, all those little childhood lessons sink in on some level or another.' Pimlott, too, is the child of activists, and she inherited the fire even in her youth when she took it upon herself to organize the first international women's film festival, Film Furies, in Winnipeg in the early '80s. Supplied Noam Gonick's new documentary is a cumulative look at Canada's history of queer activism. 'My mom and dad were trade-union activists. They were part of the left in Winnipeg,' Pimlott recalls in a post-première interview. Pimlott followed suit, and was even encouraged by her mother to join the Nellie McClung Theatre, a trade union theatre collective, when she was a teenager. Combined with her early passion for movies, Pimlott took an activist approach to her film career, always amplifying voices under the National Film Board banner, as well as the shingle of her own company Red Queen Productions, co-founded with her partner Maya Gallus. Her career reached a high point last month with the Peabody win for Any Other Way — a documentary about Jackie Shane, a pioneering, American-born trans R&B singer who found fame in the Toronto jazz scene of the 1960s — which Pimlott characterizes with just one word: 'huge.' 'Particularly in these times, it's even more huge,' Pimlott says, referring to the anti-trans sentiment that has gripped the United States since the 2024 election. Supplied Gonick calls Parade a love letter to activists. 'To have that recognition with everything unfolding south of the border, it's an incredible honour. It's even more of a statement.' ● ● ● Parade promises to be a film with an impact that will ripple through and beyond the country's queer population this summer. Teamed with editor Ricardo Acosta and thousands of hours worth of archival material, Gonick and Pimlott have made a movie that is simultaneously a crucial record of queer activism but also a shocking account of the violence and bigotry that the movement once inspired. 'What I'm hearing from young people is that there's so much they didn't know about the activists whose shoulders they stand on. I get the sense from hearing from the younger community that there is this great need to connect with who their elders are, to have that intergenerational conversation,' Pimlott says. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. For the elders themselves, the film has the power of a family photo album, with attendant feelings that run the gamut from joy to personal tragedy. Supplied Justine Pimlott won a Peabody Award for Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. 'Flipping through a photo album can evoke many emotions, and it's not always easy,' Pimlott says. The CMHR showing will be followed by a Q&A with Gonick, Pimlott, Connie Merasty and Myra Laramee. Prior to the film, ticket holders can explore the new exhibition Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada's LGBT Purge and participate in an art-making activity. Randall KingReporter In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
CBC
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Films with Manitoba connections at Hot Docs range from surreal animation to history of 2SLGBTQ+ rights
Social Sharing With its launch in Toronto last week, the documentary film festival Hot Docs celebrated its 32nd year in earnest after coming perilously close to dissolution last year due to money woes and key staff resignations. If one can say it has rebounded in 2025, no small credit goes to Manitoba filmmakers and Manitoba subjects. Like the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Hot Docs has a rich abundance of Manitoba content (if not actual Manitoba productions) that, at minimum, affirms the province's plurality of talent. The festival began with a resounding bang with the April 24 evening opening premiere of Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance at the Hot Docs Cinema, the first of 113 docs on the program. The press/industry screening and the first public screening were held back-to-back. The National Film Board production was directed by current Winnipegger Noam Gonick and produced by former Winnipegger Justine Pimlott. Despite being laid off from the NFB last year, Pimlott has been having an impressive run of films, including her project Any Other Way, a portrait of trans soul singer Jackie Shane that just this week won a Peabody Award in the documentary category and also won the $50,000 Rogers Documentary Prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association. A comprehensive history of the fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights over the past 60 years, Parade combines a history of activism and queer themes, both of which are near and dear to the hearts of Pimlott and Gonick, both children of activists. The opening night screenings went over enthusiastically, especially since many of the activists interviewed in the film showed up for the screenings, filling the stage of the cinema with living witnesses to the events depicted. Gonick, for one, was happy to share the stage. "When it's just one person out there to represent all those voices, that's just not the way it should be," Gonick said in an interview after the screening. "So it was just perfect that we had, like, a photo call of 35 people. "Svend Robinson [Canada's first MP to come out as gay ] flew in all the way from Cypress just to be there that night." Pimlott, who premiered Any Other Way at Hot Docs last year, called the festival "this incredible platform to get word out." "At the public screening, we got a standing ovation, and most of the activists were there. So the Q&A was really taken up with these moments of these incredible people all being together in the same room, and God knows when they were last together," she said. "The audience got a chance to be in communion with these incredible elder activists," Pimlott said. "So that was really remarkable." Animated doc 9 years in the making Endless Cookie — perhaps the most eccentric documentary since Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg — is an animated feature centred on the lives of half-brothers and storytelling collaborators Seth and Peter Scriver. Seth, who is white, lives in Toronto, while Peter, who is white and Cree, lives in Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba. Their relationship and their larger family lives are expressed in chaotic animation. This is the closest any filmmaker has come to capturing the psychedelia of Heavy Traffic -era Ralph Bakshi, courtesy of animator Seth, who co-directed the 2013 animated road movie Asphalt Watches. More than nine years in the making, the film went through changes, including the fact that little children seen in the beginning of the film transmogrified into adults by the end, including the title character Cookie (who, of course, is drawn as a literal cookie). "Cookie is not a little tiny Cookie anymore," Seth said at a Q&A following the screening last Sunday. The nature of the film revealed itself during attempts to record typically clean animation dialogue, he said. "Originally, when we started, it was going to be straight up good recording, with no interruption," said Seth. "But Pete lives in a four-bedroom house with nine kids and 16 dogs, so it's insane to try to record anything. "So eventually, we gave into the insanity and let it go." Will the film have a premiere in Shamattawa? "We have to figure that out. But that's the plan," Seth said. "There's tons of people that are bugging us to see it, but only the family has seen it. But it's going to happen." Another doc with Winnipeg roots, The Nest focuses on a Victorian mansion in the city's Armstrong's Point neighbourhood, a storied house on West Gate that was the childhood home of the film's Winnipeg-born co-director Julietta Singh. She joined forces with co-director Chase Joynt in a lush and often startling investigation of the house's history, which includes being the residence of Métis firebrand Annie Bannatyne, housing a school for deaf people, and serving as home to a Japanese family after wartime internment, in addition to the story of Singh's mother, who raised her mixed-race children there and spent decades restoring the house to its Victorian-era glory while running it as a bed and breakfast. "I left the house as a teenager — actually moved out when I was 15, and I left Winnipeg itself in my early 20s to go to school," said Singh, who now teaches post-colonial literature, along with gender and sexuality studies, at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "Before the film, my experience of the house was a hard one. It was the repository of difficult family memories of filial violence, but also it was a very white and racist neighborhood when we were growing up there," Singh said. "When we moved in, in 1980, we were told very explicitly, 'We don't want your kind around here,'" she said. "So my coming back and forth from Winnipeg has been to visit my mother and to visit that house over many decades, and my experience of the house really shifted through the making of the film." Quiet, rich life on Mennonite farm At 90 years old, Agatha Bock is the unlikely star of Agatha's Almanac, directed by her niece Amalie Atkins. Over its 86-minute running time, we witness Agatha tending to her ancestral Mennonite farm in rural Manitoba, lingering over details both beautiful (buckets of ruby-red strawberries) and subtly hilarious (Agatha likes to put masking tape on objects for easy identification, such as "Very good bucket — 2003"). But viewed as a whole, the film is a testament to living a quiet, rich life. Prior to a screening in Toronto, Agatha recalled the genesis of the film. "She started by taking a few pictures and then eventually decided she would make a film out of it," Bock said. "And so she just kept coming and coming." Atkins, who lives in Saskatoon, said she showed Agatha a rough cut last year, and the subject of the film maintained her honesty in her critique. "I went for her 90th birthday, and I showed her the first hour," Atkins said. "And she said, 'You've got to cut this down!'" There wasn't time then to watch the second hour. "But that was enough feedback," said Atkins, laughing. "So then I went back into the film and kept arranging and cutting and trimming." 'To make a movie about me was very scary' The 10-minute documentary Becoming Ruby is one of six shorts commissioned by Hot Docs to celebrate ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things. That certainly describes Alex Nguyen, Manitoba's first drag artist-in-residence at Winnipeg's Rainbow Resource Centre in the persona of Ruby Chopstix. Winnipeg director Quan Luong, who, like Nguyen, is of Vietnamese heritage, says it was fun to shoot Ruby in performance, but he was just as compelled by the film's quieter behind-the-scenes moments. "The relationship between Alex and their mom was so beautiful to capture," said Luong. Nguyen said it was a challenge to reveal the person behind Ruby's elaborate makeup. "To make a movie about me was very scary, but very rewarding," Nguyen said, adding it was "very healing to talk about myself for once." "I was imagining my younger self watching it," Nguyen said. "Really, this is a very impactful thing that I wish I had growing up."
