Monique Barrie spent 14 years building a dental hygiene practice and another decade running a Montessori school before she started a film production company in 2023. Three years later, LHI Productions, her company, has nine nominations at the 2026 AMPIA Rosie Awards across its two documentaries, Not In My City: The Paul Brandt Story and The Legacy of a Butterfly.
That is not the usual arc for someone entering the film industry in their late 40s. Most people who make that switch spend years finding their footing before an industry body puts their name on an official nominee list. Barrie’s timeline compressed that considerably.
From Dental Chairs To A Directing Credit
The Legacy of a Butterfly picked up four nominations on its own, Best Director Unscripted Under 30 Minutes, Best Unscripted Production Under 30 Minutes, Best Editor Unscripted Under 30 Minutes and Best Overall Sound Unscripted Under 30 Minutes, with editor Morgan Ermter recognized alongside Barrie. Not In My City: The Paul Brandt Story, made with Paul Brandt himself, drew five nominations of its own, including Best Screenwriter Unscripted Under 30 Minutes. She has also executive produced The Saint and the Bear, now on CBC Gem, produced Immortal Embrace and The Hunter and His Apprentice, and has a television pilot, Renegade Fever, that premiered at the Calgary Underground Film Festival. In 2025, Calgary Arts Development recognized her with its RBC Emerging Artist Award.
Her production work runs through two banners, LHI Productions and Aagimaak Productions, the latter built specifically to back underrepresented Indigenous and BIPOC artists and get their stories in front of a wider audience. It is a deliberate part of what she has chosen to build her second career around, not an afterthought attached to a mission statement.
Calgary’s Film Industry Is Not Just A Tax Credit Story
Alberta’s screen industry conversation tends to center on production incentives, sound stage capacity and how many out of province shoots the province can attract in a given year. That is a real story and a worthwhile one. It is not the only one.
Barrie’s path is a reminder that some of Calgary’s film output is not imported at all. It is built by people already living here, already running other businesses here, who decided the city had room for one more industry alongside dental care and early childhood education. LHI Productions runs with a small crew, modest by industry standards, and modest is exactly the point. It did not need a studio deal to land on an AMPIA nominee list.
A Second Act That Still Answers To The First Two
Barrie has described feeling hard to categorize because her ventures do not sit in one lane. “People look at me and they don’t quite know where to put me because I don’t fit in any particular box,” she has said. In an economy that increasingly rewards specialists who stay in their lane, that resistance to categorization is itself a kind of Alberta story, the one where nobody tells you that you only get to build one thing.
What is the last piece of Alberta made film or television you actually sought out?
