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Claire Prieto

Claire Prieto

Clarie Prieto is a Trinidadian-Canadian TV and film producer, director and distributor whose work was vital to the birth and growth of Black Canadian cinema. Her films focus on Black history and culture and the experiences of Black Canadian women. Some Black Women (1975), which Prieto produced, is considered to be the first film ever made by a Black Canadian about the perspectives of the Black community in Canada. 

Prieto also played an important role in the Black Film and Video Network, whose goal, as she put it, was “to encourage and promote the development, production and distribution of the work of Black film and video-makers in Canada.”  The BFVN “emerged after the death of pioneering Black Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Hodge de Silva… and quickly evolved into a formal organization, led by Claire Prieto.”  

Along with Roger McTair, Prieto was a partner in the Toronto-based production company Prieto-McTair Productions, which operated from 1982 to 2007. She co-directed Home to Buxton (1987, with Roger McTair), produced It’s Not an Illness (1979) and Jennifer Hodge: The Glory and the Pain (1991), and co-produced How She Move (2007) and the Black Canadian TV sitcom Lord Have Mercy! (2003). Prieto also directed the NFB films Black Mother Black Daughter (1988, with co-director Sylvia Hamilton) and Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989). 

In 2010, Prieto was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Caribbean Tales Film Festival in Toronto.