It is with immense pride that we share the pleasure of announcing Winnipeg director Noam Gonick and Toronto producer Justine Pimlott’s feature doc, Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance, will have its world premiere on Thursday, April 24th as the Opening Night Film for the 2025 Toronto Hot Docs Festival. The film will show again on April 26th and May 3rd.

Parade 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—from police raids to early drag shows, community organizing to the House of Commons—audiences are brought to the frontlines of the struggle and the complex history of our country’s diverse communities is brought to life.

This project was an incredible collaborative effort that includes several A/CA members whose work we wish to acknowledge:

Dr. Rebecka Sheffield, a central driver and producer of this project, worked throughout the pandemic and through archives and special collections across the country and beyond, searching for footage, photographs, and audio recordings that document pivotal moments in our history. 

This film was also restored and supported, in part, through Dr. Schem Rogerson Bader’s MITACS-funded postdoctoral research with Archive/Counter-Archive and The ArQuives.

Thank you also to Dr. Aimee Mitchell (York University) and Dr. Patrick Keilty (University of Toronto) who facilitated some of the archival work in partnership with The ArQuives. 

This partnership—supporting a film project produced by the NFB called Parade—was CineMobilia’s inaugural project in 2022. A tonne of the film scanning was done by CineMobilia’s director of operations, Jean-Pierre Marchant. 

For the film’s screening times and to purchase tickets: https://hotdocs.ca/whats-on/hot-docs-festival/films/2025/parade.

Click here to watch the trailer and view excerpts on the NFB website.