Noam Gonick

Noam Gonick, RCA (born March 20, 1973) is a Canadian filmmaker and artist. His films include Hey, Happy!, Stryker, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight and To Russia with Love. His work deals with homosexuality, social exclusion, dystopia and utopia.

Gonick was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1970. His father, Cy Gonick, is an economist and former member of the Manitoba Legislature. Gonick graduated from Ryerson University in Toronto. He edited Ride, Queer, Ride (1997) a collection of writings on and by filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. In 2007, he was made the youngest inductee to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

He has been on the board at the Plug-In Institute of the Contemporary Arts.

Gonick's first film was the 1997 short 1919, a historically revisionist depiction of the Winnipeg General Strike from the window of a gay Oriental bathhouse. His next film was the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight, narrated by Tom Waits and featuring Shelley Duvall. The film captures Maddin as he begins production on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). In 1999, Gonick created the experimental short Tinkertown.

In 2001, Gonick released his first feature film, Hey, Happy!. The film premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, and had its Canadian premiere at the Inside Out Film and Video Festival, where it won the award for Best Canadian Film. In its subsequent Canadian theatrical release, it was screened with Guy Maddin's short film The Heart of the World.

In the early 2000s, Gonick directed a number of episodes of Canadian documentary television series KinK, before releasing his second feature film Stryker in 2004.

In 2007, Gonick wrote and directed Retail, a comedy television pilot, followed by Hirsch (2010), on John Hirsch, and What If? (2011), on Leslee Silverman, artistic director of Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

In 2012, he won the Winnipeg Film Group's Manitoba Film Hothouse Award.