Winner of the 2018 Prism Prize for best Canadian music video, for R&B artist Charlotte Day Wilson and director Fantavious Fritz, during their acceptance speech the winning duo announced their prize money would be given to two important causes they champion: for Wilson, a women’s shelter in her neighbourhood, for Fritz the creation of a “one-time grant” to be awarded to a nascent woman director to make a music video.
Toronto-based R & B singer Charlotte Day Wilson, and director Fantavious Fritz, were awarded the 2018 Prism Prize for best Canadian music video, for their video, "Work"
Day Wilson told CBC Music following the gala presentation …
“I knew I wanted to donate my portion because the video didn’t cost me any money to make, and I didn’t want to profit off people who had volunteered their time to be featured in this gorgeous, moving video. Every day, I walk past a women’s shelter on my way to work, and when the two of us won the Prism award, I thought, ‘Who really needs the money, who could I help, where could my portion of the $15,000 prize money best be spent, make the most difference?’ The answer to that question for me, as a feminist and an artist, was easy, and that’s why I donated my $7500 to the women’s shelter, to make a difference.”
In fact, we are in the midst of a women’s revolution that began with the worldwide suffragette movement and women’s involvement in the union movement of the 1920s through WWII — when women worked in the factories that kept western economies alive, and made the difference in the fight to preserve western democracy, through until the 1960s and 1970s with the works of Germaine Greer, Bette Friedan, Kate Millett, Diana E. H. Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Laurence, Andrea Dworkin, June Callwood, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Gloria Steinem, and in more recent years Susan Faludi, Joy Kogawa, Marilyn Fry, Inga Muscio, Charlotte Bunch, Eden Robinson, Judy Rebick, Sheila Rowbotham & Naomi Klein, among many, many other feminist writers of consequence.
In 2018 in Vancouver, voters will be given a choice — and a must-elect contingent of women political candidates to vote for — women of conscience and accomplishment, social justice warriors and difference makers from across the political spectrum, from the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association’s tremendous Sarah Kirby-Yung; the always hard-working woman of the people, Melissa De Genova (we’re not sure where she’s gonna land); independent and hero, Sarah Blyth; the Green Party of Vancouver’s democrat par excellence, Adriane Carr; Vision Vancouver’s women of conscience City Council candidates, Heather Deal, Catherine Evans and Margot Sangster; the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ near-revolutionary must-elects Anne Roberts & Jean Swanson; to 2018’s must-must-elect OneCity Vancouver Council candidate Christine Boyle — and that’s only at City Council, for this feminist contingent of must-votes in the critically important to our collective future 2018 Vancouver civic election.
