Williams will receive the Canadian Screen Awards’ Changemaker Award for her work with Reelworld, a festival and series of professional development initiatives for racially diverse filmmakers
Since launching Reelworld as a festival in 2000, Tonya Williams has expended it into a series of initiatives, including the Reelworld Training Lab for producers and writers; the Reelworld Hollywood Connector; the Reelworld Black Entrepreneurs Program; and Access Reelworld, Canada’s largest database for racially diverse talent.Tonya Williams, the Canadian actor and founder of Reelworld, which she grew from a film festival into a phenomenon, recently unearthed a document from 1987.
“If you’re born Black, you’re automatically an activist,” she says. “It’s a given that I’m a changemaker – I’m just doing survival.” “I took a lesson from that,” Williams says. “Let someone stop you. Don’t stop yourself. If the sign says, ‘No women allowed,’ well, note to self: Let’s get women in there.”
Two breaks launched her career: She won Miss Black Ontario, sponsored by her hair salon, Azan’s, then landed a national commercial for milk that put her milk-mustached face on billboards. “The Black and South Asian communities, who were seeing no images of themselves, wanted their daughters to meet me,” she says. “It confirmed the idea my parents raised me with: What you do affects your entire Black community.
After 24 years, Williams is ready to stop rising at 5 a.m. L.A. time and working well past 5 p.m. Toronto time; her latest plan is a two-year ebb away from Reelworld. But she’ll continue advocating for change – the right kind. “I understand that if you’re in your 20s now, change is not happening fast enough,” she says. “But lasting change takes time.
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