Clarie Prieto is a Trinidadian-Canadian producer, director, and distributor whose work spans television and film. The 1975 film Some Black Women, which Prieto produced, is viewed as the first film ever made by a Black Canadian about the perspectives of the Black community in Canada. In 1988, Prieto co-founded the Black Film & Video Network (BFVN), a collective of Black film and television professionals, including filmmakers, curators, critics, publicists, producers, actors and photographers. The BFVN (read Amanda Parris’ oral history on the group) was instrumental in creating spaces for Black Canadian filmmakers through their advocacy for developmental training, production and distribution opportunities for Black film and video-makers in Canada.
She also co-founded Prieto-McTair Productions, a Toronto-based production company, with fellow filmmaker and then partner Roger McTair, which operated from 1982 to 2007. Prieto has been nominated for several Gemini awards (now the Canadian Screen Awards), including nominations for her short film Survivors, her documentary It’s Not an Illness, and her producing work on the award-winning Lord Have Mercy!, Canada’s first Black Canadian sitcom. In 2010, she received a Lifetime Achievement award from the CaribbeanTales Film Festival.
Films:
It’s Not an Illness (1979)
Home to Buxton (1987)
Black Mother Black Daughter (1988)
Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989)
Jennifer Hodge: The Glory and the Pain (1991)