Throughout its 96-minute running time, Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance (opening Hot Docs 2025) covers a huge amount of ground. The film, directed by Noam Gonick and supported by National Film Board of Canada, touches on everything from the persecution and marginalisation of gays and lesbians in the Canada of the 1950s and 1960s to Black Lives Matter and the emergence of the “two spirit” movement among gay Indigenous communities. It features dozens of interviews and a treasure trove of archival material.
“You’re only as good as your team. I had a cracker top-flight editor in Ricardo Acosta to cut the film – and the National Film Board gave us the time we needed so we could really delineate those chapters,” Gonick explains how he was able to go into such depth in the documentary. “Justine Pimlott, the producer, has been making this film in her mind forever, and similarly I have always had a great interest in Queer history…from the green light forward, I think we had a good five years.”
Making the film gave Gonick new insight into the extent of State brutality against Canada’s 2SLGBTQI+ movement. (2SLGBTQI+ is an acronym used in Canada since 2023 to designate the sexual and gender diverse communities in Canada).
“I didn’t know how bloody and visceral the police were against our community in Montreal in 1990,” the director refers to the now notorious raid of the Sex Garage warehouse party and the violence used against protesters the following day. “I was aware there were protests around a really cool party I wish I had been to – but when I saw the archival footage of what was done to those young protesters in the streets, that was really shocking!”
The director pays tribute to archival researcher Nancy Marcotte and her team in sourcing this material. “She [Marcotte] would go into Queer archives, media libraries, broadcasters… [and] activist filmmakers and would re-digitise old 16mm footage. Every clip has its own history and story.”
Gonick talks of “taking advantage in a gracious way” of Canada’s rich history of activist filmmaking. “We wanted to get their material back out there on screen.”
Parade ends on an ambivalent note. On the one hand, the activists have achieved great things. Pride marchers used to be vilified and barracked but, not so long ago, in 2016, they were joined by the then-Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau. That seemed like a very clear sign of social progress. However, Gonick is quick to remind his London-based interviewer of the current situation in the UK where the Supreme Court ruled recently that the term “woman” is defined by biological sex rather than by gender.
“The film really coalesces with this trans debate which is at the front of mind for everyone right now,” the director observes. The film, he adds, is urging viewers to remain “vigilant.” With Trump back in the White House, they can take nothing for granted.
“Let’s remember how we won these rights before because it looks like we are going to have to re-litigate these battles.”
Gonick makes some intriguing formal choices in telling his story. For example, all the interviews are shot in deeply textured black and white. This is a nod toward the work of the American-Canadian photographer, Yousuf Karsh, famous for his portraits of everybody from Bette Davis to Churchill.
“I wanted to portray these people, these activists, like in proper portraits, like a Yousuf Karsh. We had a buzz phrase in the studio, ‘Karsh, but not too harsh!’ We wanted people to look good…I wanted to really uplift these great activists whose shoulders we stand on, and to make them look as epic as they really are.”
Although the film is touching on prejudice and oppression, it has moments of humour along the way. For example, we are treated to some barbed and funny quips about the coiffure of the anti-gay rights activist, Anita Bryant, from Winnipeg-born comedian Robin Tyler (herself famous as the first lesbian comic to come out on national TV).
“I fought for every piece of humour we could extract from this story because otherwise it is just so devastating…the one thing queers are famous for is their sense of humour too.”
There is a celebration of the work of the journalists behind ground-breaking Canadian gay monthly publication, The Body Politic. “I can remember as a 17-year-old furtively glancing at the cover of The Body Politic on the magazine rack,” the director reminisces of his own adolescence. The magazine closed down in 1987 but its impact is still acknowledged today.
The film also chronicles some shameful and truly horrific moments. We hear from Jeanine Maes about how she was thrown into an asylum in the 1960s because of her homosexuality. Gonick’s diligent researchers tracked her down. “She is still alive, in her late 80s, and is a real resilient person.”
Archive costs made up a “huge part” of the production budget. The filmmakers were able to draw on material held by the National Film Board, but Gonick and his team had to fight hard to get certain things into the film, for example the Tony Hatch pop classic, Downtown.
“Our archivists, as you can tell, were much more than just providers of film and video. They found interviews, subjects and they also encouraged me in the edit too.”
Alongside the activists, the documentary also includes interviews with “two giants of Canadian Queer cinema” – John Greyson and Lynne Fernie.
In the case of Greyson, director of such titles as Zero Patience and Lilies, Gonick regards him not only as an inspiration but as a near doppelgänger too.
“We’re very tight. We actually look similar. When I was turning 30 and he was turning 40, we had a joint birthday party where neither of our friends could tell the other apart because we wore the same clothes. It was quite funny…this isn’t one of those smash and grab documentaries where you find a subject, shoot them and they never hear from you again. These are long-term relationships.”
Inevitably, not everything made it into the final cut. Interviews had to be left out either because there wasn’t space or the filmmakers couldn’t find the contextual archival material needed to support them. There has been talk of spinning off a longer TV version but it is yet to be seen if this will actually happen.
The documentary, which will hit the festival circuit in Canada and beyond after its Hot Docs world prem, is dedicated to “the activists who stepped off the sidewalk and into the streets.” Some of its subjects have already passed away, among them Canadian queer activist Amy Gottlieb who died in 2023, and LGBTQ+ activist Ron Rosenes, who also died in 2023. Others are now in palliative care and very late in life. “This kind of history is fragile and it is fading away quickly. There was a certain sense of urgency that we needed to get this stuff on the record,” the director states.
The documentary, though, also includes younger voices, among them historian Tom Hooper.
Gonick has a long association with Hot Docs. His early feature doc Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight, won Best Arts documentary at the festival way back in 1998. “I think it makes perfect sense to launch it [Parade} here,” the director says.
