Producer Justine Pimlott has had a helluva year.
The documentary A Mother Apart, co-produced by Pimlott at the NFB with OYA Media Group, won the Best First Feature and the Best Canadian Feature awards as well as the Audience Award for Best Documentary at last year’s Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival. Any Other Way, the doc she produced at the NFB alongside Banger Films, about the trailblazing trans singer Jackie Shane, won the lucrative—$50,000 to be exact—Rogers Best Canadian Documentary award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. And just before we sat down for our interview, Pimlott found out that her production Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance will open the 2025 edition of Hot Docs.
The trifecta, three of over 20 documentary projects she’s co-produced independently, with Red Queen Productions, and as a producer at Ontario’s NFB studio, caps a decades-long commitment to amplifying 2SLGBTQ+ voices in film and makes her the most successful queer producer ever at the National Film Board.
Parade is a moving film, tracking well-known events and some wonderfully surprising discoveries and characters (disclosure: including myself) who, bolstered by a trove of archival footage, help trace some of the key moments in Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ history. The doc also makes vivid the ways creating communities—lesbian, Latinx, Black and Indigenous, for example—empower identities that lead to life-changing political action.
It’s a crowning achievement for Pimlott, who was born in Winnipeg to committed leftie parents and has been a political activist all her life.
“I grew up with two parents who were social activists involved in labour unions and art. My mother saw the fire in me and she did not want it extinguished,” Pimlott says over ginger tea in the home she shares with Maya Gallus, her partner in life and art with whom she co-founded Red Queen. “At a very early age it was instilled in me that you stand up for yourself and that you deserve to be respected and to be seen and that you speak up.”
When she began to make movies, she became a champion of committed filmmaking, meaning that when it came to Parade, Pimlott wasn’t an objective observer talking to queer politicos as if she were in a science lab.
“Members of our team are not only filmmakers, we are activists. I was lying on the street in those ‘die-ins,’ I was at the Sex Garage sit-ins in Montreal when the police attacked us. I’ve always wanted to bring the social activism that I grew up with to this beautiful art form.”
Sensing a gap in queer political history’s presence on the cinematic landscape, Pimlott initiated the Parade project in 2018. She assembled her team, including director Noam Gonick, whose visual perspective she admired, and Ricardo Acosta, who edited her very first film, to create a working group that thrived on collaboration and had the benefit of being able to offer differing perspectives.
“What was interesting is that we were coming from three different queer experiences: Ricardo is Afro Cuban, Noam is queer, and I’ve identified as a lesbian, as a dyke, since I was in my teens. Though I now identify as queer.”
They understood that no single documentary can do justice to an entire history of queerdom in Canada. That would have had to include everything: political organization and resistance, essential legal victories and action in the arts and other aspects of culture. So they had to find a focus.
“Parade looks at some of the key milestones in the rise of the 2SLGBTQ+ movements in Canada,” Pimlott explains. “I was struck by how many of those stories hadn’t really been told. This was an important legacy doc that needed to be made and the NFB is a place that gives you the time and resources to make it.”
Pimlott’s determination to increase queer visibility goes beyond the work itself. On a personal level she has always been out and proud.
“Even when I’ve felt vulnerable as a lesbian, I was going to be out and loud,” she says with conviction. “I wasn’t going to be silent. I was going to take up my space.”
And she’s done that wherever she’s plied her trade. As a brash young sound recordist at the NFB’s Studio D, which famously promoted female talent and stories, she stood up for her queerness, especially in relation to the undercurrent among the NFB men who in whispers, Pimlott says, referred to the feminist unit as Studio Dyke.
“They were weaponizing that language to silence women and the studio and it’s typical. Trying to disgrace them is part of the patriarchal playbook. But I was, like, ‘Thanks for the compliment.’”
Red Queen Productions, formed in 2003, was one of the first openly queer production companies to arrive on the Canadian film scene. But it wasn’t always received with open arms.
“We pitched to a lot of cis hetero decision-makers and we’d be accused of having an agenda. My response was, ‘Patriarchy is an agenda, hetero-normativity is an agenda,’ so it was outrageous. We were a couple and we were very out,” Pimlott says of her and Gallus. “We knew it was homophobia. It’s not always overt, but you feel it.”
By 2018, Canada was a leader in institutionalizing same-sex marriage and the trans movement was blooming. Now the backlash against trans rights is hitting a vulnerable community very hard. Pimlott recognized that Parade could not just look fondly backwards.
“Our work isn’t done,” Pimlott declares. “Our team was always thinking that same-sex marriage wasn’t the end run, that there were so many more issues to tackle. Who are the most vulnerable in the community and what are we going to do to protect their rights and protect them? The film invites the audience, us and our allies, to fight against our rights being diminished.”
Pimlott showed this kind of political passion before she could vote. As a teenager just out of high school in Winnipeg, she organized the city’s first Women’s Film Festival, called Film Furies, which featured the works of artists like Margarethe von Trotta and Agnès Varda. She recognized the gap in representation, filled it, and was rewarded when the event became an immediate sell-out.
And she was noticed immediately. Charismatic, high energy, outspoken—no coincidence her email address contains the word “noisy”—and fiercely determined, qualities she’s since honed to the max, she caught the attention of Ches Yetman, executive producer at the NFB Studio in Winnipeg. He suggested she apply for a slot with Studio D’s new skills training program, designed to develop women’s abilities in the technical aspects of filmmaking.
The studio offered Pimlott training in sound and she couldn’t believe her good fortune. She received assistance with housing, got on-the-job training and was mentored by two top sound recorders, Esther Auger and Diane Carrière. Pimlott relished the physical demands of sound recording, carting around heavy equipment—she was recording on quarter-inch tape—handling the boom maneuvering gear. She got deep into it and returned to Montreal for another program, this one full-year.
One thing you can count on about Pimlott: she goes for it. While she was at the film board she heard word of Cynthia Scott’s project that became The Company of Strangers, a brilliant feature about a group of diverse women who become stranded when their tour bus breaks down. She went to Scott and said, basically, that she’d do anything the director required in order to participate and learn. Scott suggested she record the auditions for the film, many of which involved improvisation.
The experience sowed the seeds of Pimlott’s career and values as a filmmaker. She learned about the audition process and the value of diversity, representation, intersectionality and, even though she was there as a novice sound technician, casting; when it was obvious that the film required an elder cast member, it was Pimlott who recommended bringing in the compelling artist and writer Mary Meigs.
With her experience at the NFB and her deep-seated commitment to giving voice to queer and other marginalized people, Pimlott turned to directing. Her first feature Laugh in the Dark, about a chosen family of gay men in Crystal Beach, Ontario, was well received, and then she met Gallus while working sound on Gallus’s film Erotica: A Journey into Female Sexuality.
“I learned so much from working with her. And I continue to learn from her, so much about stories, structure, pacing,” she remembers. Eventually they teamed up to form Red Queen.
“We wanted to own the means of production, to make gender equality stories from the 2SLGBTQ+ community a priority and to have agency and ownership over our work.”
The challenge of working and living together has never been much of an issue. That’s in part because humour and play are essential to them both, personally and in their work.
“We both have the same sense of humour and that’s very important. And when we need to set boundaries, we just say, ‘I don’t want to talk about work anymore. Our work is our passion; we don’t have kids, these are our creations and we love what we do,” says Pimlott.
Over 11 years, Gallus and Pimlott created eight films together, including Fag Hags: Women who Love Gay Men, a movie that aimed to provide an authentic portrait of women who are often painfully stereotyped, and Derby Crazy Love, a fun look at the powerful women who play roller derby with wild ferocity. A key Red Queen title is Girl Inside, released in 2007, which was one of the first intimate film portraits of a woman undergoing the process of affirming her gender.
It was not only a singularly ground breaking documentary, it deepened Pimlott’s commitment to a process of respecting and creating trust with her subjects. Pimlott is decidedly not interested in a “gotcha” game.
“When you have the privilege to make a film about Madison (the main character in Girl Inside) and her family, that’s another way of exploring collaboration. Madison’s consent was important to us. We were constantly checking in with her because the contract wasn’t a fixed thing. You need to build that trust.” That dynamic continued through the making of Parade.
Her creative relationship with Gallus, often as co-director and co-producer, instilled in Pimlott confidence that she could thrive as a producer—a creative producer, to use her preferred term. She accepted the producer position at Ontario NFB in 2014 in part to queer up the institution, but also to put that institution’s heft behind the amplification of marginalized voices. And, she does love being a producer.
“I love it because I have the wide lens. I’ve got the wide shot,” she says. “The producer can zoom in and be there in the trenches with the director and editor as we figure out the story and the structure but I can also zoom out to get the wider picture. I touch every single person on a production.”
At the NFB, Pimlott produced over 15 projects and supported artists like Vivek Shraya, Jordan Tannahill, Chase Joynt, and Julietta Singh, whose film The Nest also screens at Hot Docs this year. As well, Pimlott continued to hone her gift for collaboration, including through co-productions. She worked alongside the OYA Media Group, whose mandate is to celebrate Black stories, to create the award-winning A Mother Apart, directed by Laurie Townshend, about a Black queer woman, once abandoned as a child, now determined to be a better mother to her own daughter.
“Working with director Laurie Townshend and OYA producers Alison Duke and Ngardy Conteh George was such an inspiring experience,” Pimlott recalls. “We had many rich discussions about societal expectations of mothers, our own experiences of being mothered and the ways we mother others. It was powerful to explore.”
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story is its own kind of miracle. Pimlott was developing the documentary at the same time Michael Mabbott was working on his own film about the transgender singer. When he pitched it to NFB Executive Producer Anita Lee, Lee urged Mabbott and his Banger team, including co-director Lucah Rosenberg, to connect with Pimlott and the collaboration was wildly successful, winning the prestigious Rogers prize.
“When Michael and I met, I felt like Jackie put us together. It was a great collaboration,” recalls Pimlott. “The question was how to bring Jackie to life. There was only one piece of footage of her performing and some ephemera, but every doc biopic usually has an enormous amount of archival material.
“The team decided to cast Sandra Caldwell as an older Shane to lip-sync to telephone conversations with Mabbott, superimposing images of Shane over Caldwell’s face and using rotoscope to create a semblance of realistic action.
“The great thing about documentary filmmaking,” says Pimlott with a smile, “is that things that appear to be creative obstacles become opportunities.”
But 2024’s helluva year became real hell when the NFB laid off 55 employees, Pimlott among them. In that moment, Pimlott was less worried about herself than she was about the fact that Parade was suddenly in limbo.
“(The layoff) was very difficult but I don’t want to focus on that. For me the most important thing was to make sure I could complete Parade, get it to the finish line and make it the best it could be. And I was able to do that. Here we are, about to open Hot Docs 2025. These stories about the community that I’ve dedicated my life to will be seen. I can’t wait to be in an audience with the activists that are in the film, with Noam and Ricardo and the entire production team, my team.”
As for the future, filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Alanis Obomsawin, who got to work into their 90s, are role models for Pimlott. She’ll be developing projects with Gallus and Red Queen. Pimlott will also work with other filmmakers as a consultant and Executive Producer and continue to mentor emerging filmmakers and producers, because she wants to give back what she received.
“And I’m looking into an endeavour that is still in the exploratory stage. Its goal is to make sure there is adequate funding for 2SLGBTQ+ projects and that our stories are not silenced but amplified. This is more important than ever and I have a role to play, not only queering the documentary landscape but the Canadian film industry at large.” Justine Pimlott is not nearly done with her prodigious life and career.
Parade opens Hot Docs 2025 on April 24.
Read this story in print in our current issue.
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Correction: The print version of this story states that Makayla Walker played the elder Shane in Any Other Way. Walker played the younger Shane, while Sandra Caldwell played the elder Shane during phone conversations with Michael Mabbott. POV apologizes to Pimlott, Walker, and Caldwell for the errors and omissions.
