Tonya Williams has spent the last few decades creating change in Canada’s film and TV sector, and she’s far from finished.

The founder and executive director of the Reelworld Screen Institute is being recognized by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television (Canadian Academy) with its 2024 Changemaker Award, which honours members of the industry that have played an active role in helping to dismantle racism in the audiovisual sector.

One of Williams’ most recent achievements through Reelworld will help push the needle forward even more. The Her Frame Matters initiative, set to launch in June, is a protocol guideline on how to identify and eliminate the depiction of harmful stereotypes of Black, Indigenous, Asian and other racialized women on screen.

“There’s not a lot of nuance around these characters, it’s very one-dimensional,” Williams tells Playback Daily. “They appear out of nowhere and are used to move other people’s stories forward. Doing the protocol guideline was very important to me in terms of what we could come up with to help broadcasters, producers, casting directors, writers and agents in the industry to better help and serve women of colour.”

The guideline was created out of a two-year research study, helmed by lead researcher Dr. Patience Adamu, and partially funded by the federal government via the Feminist Response and Recovery Fund. The research study will be published alongside the protocol guideline.

At least 20 people were involved in the study and guideline creation, according to Williams, not including the hundreds of individuals who were interviewed in the study.

The depiction of Black women on screen is something Williams has contended with throughout her career, both on and off the screen.

Williams got her start in 1980 as the host of TVO children’s series Polka Dot Door, followed by a lead role in the 1985 CTV sitcom Check It Out!, before becoming a household name as Olivia Winters in the soap opera The Young and the Restless. She started the role in 1990 and would appear off and on until 2012.

“[The Young and the Restless] blew me up in such a massive way that it allowed me the power to form Reelworld, something I really wanted to do,” she says.

She founded the Reelworld Film Festival in 2000, which has since expanded to the Reelworld Screen Institute, encompassing the festival and the Reelworld Foundation. Beyond giving a platform to underrepresented voices in the industry via the annual Festival, the non-profit provides training and professional development opportunities, working with partners such as Amazon MGM Studios and Meridian Artists.

It’s her experience through Reelworld that gives Williams this key insight to the industry on how to move forward in its inclusivity work: allow people of colour to fail.

“There’s just so many things that have gone wrong, where I didn’t think I could hang on for one more minute, but just kept persevering,” she says. “You just keep moving forward and then inch by inch something gets a little easier. Of the last 24 years [at Reelworld], it took 20 years before I felt, ‘Okay, we’re in a better place.'”

Reelworld is in the process of planning for its 25th anniversary, which Williams says may be a year-long celebration.

“There’s so much that we have accomplished, but there’s so much that I want to do,” she says. “The industry is changing rapidly and I’m a believer that you have to adjust to those changes to be relevant.

“It’ll be really interesting to see where we are even five years from now because access, how we communicate and how the audience wants to receive content is all changing very rapidly,” she continues. “I think all of us are just trying to hang on and figure out what direction the industry is taking.”

When asked about Reelworld’s greatest impact so far, Williams gives one simple message: “Hope is the one thing that cannot be taken away. You can beat a person down and you can say no a million times, but if they can hang on to hope, they will keep striving and keep trying to move forward. And that’s what I’ve done with Reelworld.”

Photo by Alan Weissman