Latest news with #NoamGonick
Canada Standard
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Canada Standard
National launch of NFB feature documentaryParade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance.Screenings start this month in Canadian cities with broadcast and streaming premieres on TVO and NFB platforms during Pride Month.
May 20, 2025 - Toronto - National Film Board of Canada (NFB) An acclaimed look at activism that sparked the rise of Canada's 2SLGBTQI+ movement, Winnipeg director Noam Gonick and Toronto producer Justine Pimlott's National Film Board of Canada (NFB) feature documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance begins a national rollout in May. Over 15 Canadian community and festival screenings are confirmed for Parade , with more cities to come. Pride Month in June will also feature broadcast and online premieres on TVO and NFB platforms. The film recently opened the Hot Docs film fest, where it was voted a top ten audience favourite. About Parade Unflinching, bold, enraging and hopeful, this vital new chapter in the queer canon captures pivotal moments that sparked Canada's 2SLGBTQI+ movement, honouring the activists and elders whose resistance led to the rights we have today. Through rarely seen archival footage and first-person accounts, audiences are transported to the frontlines of the struggle. From police raids to early drag shows, community organizing to the House of Commons, Parade brings the complex history of the country's diverse communities to vivid life. Key milestones illustrate the power of taking it into the streets and underscore how easily the rights we've fought for can be revoked, making the documentary essential viewing for all Canadians. National screening schedule Dates confirmed so far May 31 at 11:45 a.m., Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, Toronto - filmmakers in attendance June 12-15, Queer North Film Festival, Sudbury June 14 (with panel discussion) and June 21, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Toronto June 22: Streaming premiere across Canada at 9 a.m. EST on TVO Docs YouTube, website and app, and broadcast premiere in Ontario at 9 p.m. EST on TVO June 26, Hello Film! at the NFB's Alanis Obomsawin Theatre, French-language screening and panel discussion, Quebec premiere presented in collaboration with Fierte Montreal and image+nation, Montreal June 27, begins streaming on NFB platforms June 27, Dixon Hall, Toronto June 27, Trans Wellness Ontario, Windsor June 28 at 6:30 p.m., Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg - panel discussion with filmmakers June 28, pflag Chapter, The Rumpus Room, Owen Sound, Ontario June 28, Museum London, London, Ontario July 26 at 2 p.m., Millennium Library, Winnipeg August 3 at 1 p.m., Richmond Public Library - Brighouse Branch, Richmond, British Columbia August 5 at 2 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Bibliothque et Archives nationales du Quebec, French-language screening, Montreal August 5 at 6 p.m., CineQueer presented by Fierte Montreal and the NFB in collaboration with image+nation at the NFB's Alanis Obomsawin Theatre, French-language screening, Montreal August 16-24, Capital Pride, Ottawa Acclaim for Parade "Parade is overflowing with intelligence, energy and honesty. At a moment in history when the freedom to love who you want and be who you want to be is in question, this film is unequivocally on the side of the angels. Parade is an absolute triumph." - Border Crossings Magazine "There are moments of heartbreak, depression, and sadness, but the film also illustrates how much love and warmth was at the heart of these equality movements. It's both critical and uplifting at the same time." - The Gate "...a call to arms to reach out to and learn from the queer elders who are still with us, and to preserve stories that are gradually disappearing. Parade invites us to see the ghosts, and challenges us not to look away." - Xtra - 30 - Stay Connected Online Screening Room: NFB Facebook | NFB X | NFB Instagram | NFB Blog | NFB YouTube | NFB Vimeo Curator's perspective | Director's notes About the NFB
CBC
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
The fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights in Canada is a story of love and resistance
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Noam Gonick focuses on his film Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance. We wanted Parade to be a call to arms: powerful, emboldening testimonies from dozens of radical queers combined with unearthed activist films, video art, NFB stock shots, news clips, personal archives and audio interviews — all interwoven into a kind of history of Canada's 2SLGBTQ+ movement. How do legacy films like this get made? It took a gutsy producer like Justine Pimlott — herself a queer filmmaker — to get us green-lit with enough time and space for editor Ricardo Acosta to craft the story. This was a deeply collaborative project. (During the process, there were a few experiences — you won't find them in the film — that I conjured to help me tackle the task.) While the title, Parade, speaks to Gay Pride in all its political and apolitical manifestations, for me, Parade is a subtle nod to the mystifying gay multi-hyphenate Jean Cocteau, whose ballet Parade inspired the first written use of the word "surrealism." Cocteau was addicted to opium, and his influence, sometimes scandalous, on the subsequent generation of French writers is the stuff of legend. So perhaps it's appropriate that Parade delves into problematic corners of the Canadian queer journey. One of the darkest was the 1977 murder of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques — a crime which was used to tarnish the gay community. This was one of the trickiest chapters in our film to get right. My family spent that summer of 1977 in Toronto. As a kid, I'd spend my days wandering the Egyptian collection of the ROM, unaware of the killing on Yonge Street's "Sin Strip." In the Annex's Jean Sibelius Square, down the street from where we were staying, I was briefly kidnapped by a woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She took me to her apartment and asked me if I knew what love was. I surprisingly encountered Lilith years later while in film school. She immediately remembered the incident. She thought I said my name was "Name." Several chapters in Parade could easily be entire films on their own. One of these was "SILENCE = DEATH." When Queer Nation fought back during the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, my boyfriend at the time, Mark Turrell, and I found ourselves in an angry mob that threw peanuts at then-federal health minister Perrin Beatty in the Hotel Vancouver. I remember feeling sorry for Perrin — he looked so dejected, his shiny head shaped like a peanut. Mark would later die, surrounded by his parents and friends as we read passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was a young artist who wanted to be the next Aubrey Beardsley. Pondering which milestones to include in Parade wasn't easy. Some stories didn't have enough archival visuals to support them, others had full films about them that Ricardo had already edited. One such story was that of Jim Egan (the subject of Jack & Jim), whose letters to the editor of various publications in the early 1960s and late-in-life Supreme Court challenge were groundbreaking. Shortly before he died, I found myself on the edge of Vancouver Island waltzing with Jim at a party alongside his partner, Jack; also present were a closeted lumberjack and a flamboyant hairdresser. The music was big-band swing, and I was a rave promoter, so our dancing was awkward. I held on to his thick polyester suit, trying to follow his back-and-forth steps while Jack looked on, laughing. Some of Jim's energy might have rubbed off on me that night. They lived in a house full of teacup chihuahuas. I regret not immortalizing those dogs on film. After film school, I returned to the city of Winnipeg (Treaty 1), where I was born — not sure where one went to apply for a job as a filmmaker. I fell in with a crowd who were organizing a gathering of gay and lesbian Indigenous people in Beausejour, Man. They were about to change the world's lexicon with the introduction of the term "two-spirit." These were the people I played pinball with at Giovanni's Room, the local gay bar in Winnipeg: Connie Merasty, with the inimitable voice and extra-wide-rimmed glasses; Francis, who was born on the same day in the same year as me; Dave, who smiled all the time; and Dorlon (RIP), a Cher impersonator who scared me but looks great dancing in Parade in a vintage clip from David Adkin's Out: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Youth. I have a lesbian comic cousin named Robin Tyler. We met while researching Parade. She organized the March on Washington in 1987, was a friend of Harvey Milk and was one half of one of the first same-sex couples to get married (then divorced) in California. She tells great jokes in Parade. Some of the visual material in the film came from my own archives. Elle Flanders commissioned me to make a Jumbotron video for Toronto Pride in 2008. No Safe Words was supposed to be about Abu Ghraib and the hazing homoerotics of conquest, torture and war. But the piece transitioned into an exposé of police in Pride. When I filmed documentation of the installation from the vantage point of Alexander Chapman's apartment overlooking Yonge Street, we were gobsmacked by the presence of squad cars and men in uniform. Alexander is also in Parade. Some of the interviews in the film feel like you're eavesdropping on conversations we've been having for years. Others, like the one with Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter Toronto, were with people I met two seconds before the interview began, walking through the studio door. While conducting interviews, it's your fevered memories that enable you to sit across from formidable world-changers and ask them to share their own incandescence.
CBC
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
What's worth watching at Hot Docs 2025?
Between financial woes and staff upheaval, the Hot Docs Film Festival has been through the wringer of late, but organizers are ready to raise the curtain on another year. The event, which is considered the largest of its kind in North America, will open its 2025 edition in Toronto on April 24. True, the program is leaner than last year, down by more than 50 titles, but there remains an overwhelming number of stories to discover: 113 films from 47 countries, many of which champion marginalized narratives and voices. The CBC Arts staff has combed through the listings, and these are the docs we're most excited to see. Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance What better way to kick off a festival than with a parade — or a documentary about one. LGBTQ folks have been proudly utilizing parades to fight for their rights over the last 60 years, and Noam Gonick's Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance offers a uniquely Canadian history of this movement, showing how this country's queer activists and elders fought for the rights we have today. The film will open the festival on April 24, and through rarely seen archival footage and first-person accounts, audiences will have an opportunity to be inspired (and at times, enraged) by the complex history of Canada's LGBTQ rights movement. –Peter Knegt The Dating Game Few narratives are as inherently packed with emotion as the search for love and companionship, and in the post-Tinder era, the stakes have never been stranger or more desperate. That's especially the case in China, where the One Child policy (which ended in 2015) has produced a nation of lonely bros. Men outnumber women by the tens of millions, and in The Dating Game, director Violet Du Feng introduces three lovelorn bachelors who are ready to leave their rural towns for the bright lights of Chongqing. They arrive in the city for a week-long crash course in landing a wife, and their teacher, Hao, claims he can deliver them results. Under Hao's supervision, the boys will surrender themselves to a professional glow up. They'll get new wardrobes, new haircuts — and, crucially, new glamour shots for their dating profiles. But will they buy into Hao's fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy, which may be more than a little inspired by pick-up artist techniques? The doc was reportedly an audience favourite at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it played to " overflow crowds." Early reviews suggest the story is imbued with humour and heart. Plus, who doesn't love a good makeover sequence? –Leah Collins Spreadsheet Champions As plenty of docs have already gone to show, you can make a sport out of just about anything. Old-school arcade games (The King of Kong), spelling (Spellbound), hobbyhorse dressage (Hobbyhorse Revolution). So why not Microsoft Excel? For 20 years, the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship has been the premiere battleground for international youngsters with a genius-level knowledge of proprietary software. The event's crown jewel is its Excel competition, described by Microsoft as a " true test of analytical and problem-solving skills." And in Spreadsheet Champions, a new feature from Australian filmmaker Kristina Kraskov, we go inside the scene, following six kids to the main event in Orlando, Florida. The young all-stars of the tournament, who range in age from 13-22, are already winners in their home countries, but this is their one and only shot at international glory. Per the championship's rules, there are no repeat visits, and the stakes are higher than you might imagine. Past competitors have seen their reality change with a keystroke, going on to secure plumb jobs and academic opportunities. The film premiered at SXSW last month, where it was on several critics' must-see lists, and according to early reviews, the cast of data wizards is a fascinating bunch, exactly the sort of characters you'd hope to meet in a picture like this one. That's compelling enough to sell me on the quirky premise. –Leah Collins Ultras If you've ever watched a soccer match and noticed the people in the stands chanting, waving flags, letting off road flares, jumping up and down and unveiling tremendous artworks, you've probably asked yourself a few questions. Who are they? Why are they doing that? Who cares that much about soccer? Who, frankly, cares that much about anything? Those football fiends are the ultras, and their love of the game goes beyond fandom. Theirs is an all-encompassing subculture, and in the documentary Ultras, filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner explores what motivates them and how they interact with the broader world. While making the doc, Ekner spent time in eight countries: Argentina, Egypt, Italy, Morocco, Poland, Sweden, Indonesia, and the U.K. While there, she immersed herself in the world of these misunderstood megafans. The film will have its North American premiere at Hot Docs. –Chris Dart Endless Cookie Seth and Peter Scriver are half brothers who were born 16 years apart. Seth is white and was raised in Toronto. Peter is Indigenous and grew up on Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba. One is a renowned cartoonist and visual artist whose animated movie Asphalt Watches won the award for best Canadian first feature film at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other is a respected storyteller, carver and trapper, who once served as chief of his First Nation. Nine years in the making, Endless Cookie is a full-length animated documentary co-directed by the siblings, and it untangles the memories and misadventures that colour their complicated relationship. Told in the younger Scriver's outlandish and psychedelic trademark style, the oddball flick premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The goal was to "make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true," Seth says in the trailer. Together, they've sketched a family portrait that appears to be heartfelt and more than just a little offbeat. But what's weirder than family, right? The Conscience Files Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona is known for the abundance of fossilized trees that litter its badlands. If you're caught removing one of the specimens, you'll face a fine. But according to accounts stretching back nearly a century, you could also bring home something much worse: it's said that thieves are cursed with bad luck. People have ascribed all manners of tragedy and ruin to pinching even just a tiny rock from the park: divorce, legal trouble, unemployment, poor health and death. A longstanding display at the visitor centre exhibits some of the letters the park has received over the decades. They're penned by remorseful pilferers who would like to return what they've taken. Director Brian Bolster's documentary The Conscience Files will see its international premiere at Hot Docs. The short film explores these tales of woe and repentance, which form a bizarre, exceedingly human archive of regret and restitution collected by the national park. This 14-minute collage of stories is, admittedly, a bit of a wild card as far as recommendations go. But its incredible premise is just too tempting not to pick — much like the petrified wood, apparently. It screens as part of a triple bill alongside Life Invisible and Lichens Are the Way, fellow shorts that look similarly unusual, abstract and environmentally minded. The Nest In my opinion, Chase Joynt is one of the most exciting Canadian voices in documentary film (No Ordinary Man, Framing Agnes), and for The Nest, he's teamed up with decolonial writer and academic Julietta Singh. Joynt and Singh co-direct the picture — a collaboration which seems poised to be a very powerful union — and the narrative follows Singh to her grand childhood home on the Assiniboine River in Manitoba. There, she listens to stories about the women who formerly lived in the house: Japanese women, Deaf women, Métis women, Indigenous women, Irish women. The film guides us through their tales — tracing 140 years of history — while reflecting on Singh's own difficult upbringing. Saints and Warriors On its face, Saints and Warriors is a sports doc about the Skidegate Saints (a basketball team from the Skidegate First Nation on Haida Gwaii) and their quest to maintain dominance at the All Native Basketball Tournament. The event is the biggest basketball competition in B.C., and it doubles as the largest Indigenous cultural event in Canada. So as the Saints fight to keep their crown, they'll face stiff competition. The Saints are up against hungry young upstart squads as well as every athlete's arch nemesis: Father Time But there's another story which takes place off the hardwood: the Haida people's fight to regain control of their traditional lands and waterways. Many of the key players in that struggle are also on the team — because the Saints aren't just hoopers, they're leaders in the community. Ultimately, this is a film about how basketball is more than a sport. It's also an act of resistance. Directed by Patrick Shannon, it will have its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs.
