Transcript

My mother’s name is Claire Prieto and I want to talk about her story.

My mother – my parents – are the first black film makers in this country, right. Umm, my mother has more than 30 years of experience in working in the film and television industry, specifically as a producer, and always had great difficulty moving into the mainstream sphere.

She was applying and going for jobs that some of the major media organizations in Canada, and almost all of them said that she was over qualified. The underlying part of this is that my mother has a specific affinity for, and support of, the black community.

They knew that if they hired my mother, she was gonna bring peoples’ color to the set. So if my mother was the executive producer, it meant that she would then go and hire 15, 20, 30 people of color – skilled, talented, educated people of color – who would come and work on that set. And that often made people very uncomfortable, and so before she left, my mother didn’t work for like two years.

My mother and father came here in 1970. She left Canada in 2007 just because there was nothing else for her here really, which is unfortunate because she leaves with all of this experience. The amount of people that my mother – specifically young women of color – that my mother had mentored is basically a who’s who of like the media, film, theatre industry – especially the people of color, you know. They always gave her awards, but they wouldn’t give her employment.

People should have the right to fulfill the goals that they want to achieve. They shouldn’t be blocked from achieving those goals, you know, based on something that is actually something that the country speaks about a lot, which is multiculturalism and equal opportunity and those sort of things. And so for that to be the reason why someone like my mother couldn’t get a job and stay in Canada and continue to make films about people of color here – for that to be the reason, is a human rights issue.