“Welcome to the Parade” is a Toronto indie feature drama, that tells the story of Michael Wiseman, a young man living with his wealthy family in Toronto’s suburbs, who finds himself thrown out of home because of his drug use. Michael decides to try downtown life on his own. He takes a room in the rundown Hotel Isabella and proceeds to fall into a lonely, drug-laden personal nightmare, accompanied by a hooker and sleazy drug dealer. Featuring Alan & Sam Powell, Jane Sowerby, Jason Ould and featuring Toronto music legend, Paul James. Selected for the Toronto International Film Festival.

Stuart Clarfield's profile page

Stuart Clarfield is born in Toronto and is a life-long film-maker, media producer and content creator. He wrote and directed the dramatic feature film “Welcome to the Parade” and has produced documentaries such as “In the Dark” and most recently “The Journey Home” and “Kensington Market: Heart of the City”. He is a graduate of York University, Dept. of Film and Video Production in Toronto, holding a BFA in Fine Arts. Stuart holds an MBA degree from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Babson College, Wellesley, MA. Stuart is a Director graduate of the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto.

With a consistency that defies explanation, this low budget dramatic feature is drawn to the struggle of teenagers to assert their own identities in an oppressive, over-regulated society. Like “Nobody Waved Goodbye”, Stuart Clarfield’s first feature focuses on a Toronto teenager who turns his back on his family in an ill-fated attempt to bust out and become his own person. Also similar to Don Owen’s seminal sixties feature is Parade’s sense of ineluctable fatalism; angered with Dad and detached from Mom, the protagonist takes a ramshackle hotel room at the the Hotel Isabella where he meets a hooker from Parry Sound and tumbles into the cocaine trade. Lacking either motivation or plans for tomorrow, his sunny sense of freedom soon darkens into a quintessentially Canadian nightmare of retribution. from Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF Canadian Perspectives