Monday, December 1, 2008

For the first time, the winner of the Toronto Film Critics Association award for Best Canadian Film will also receive a cheque for $10,000, thanks to sponsor Rogers Communications. The award will be one of a slate of hon­ours handed out at the 11th annual TFCA Awards Dinner, to be held January 6, 2009 at swish Toronto res­taurant Nota Bene. All Canadian fea­tures released the­at­ric­ally in 2008 are eli­gible for the cash prize.

Apparently, the annual dinner is being opened up to the industry and the media for the first time, although I’m not quite sure what that means to film blog­gers like me. Are we media, industry, or critics ourselves? Either way, it’s unlikely that I’ll be noshing with this year’s host Cameron Bailey or the presenter of the award for Best Canadian Film, Sarah Polley, who was last year’s winner (alas, without the cash) for her dir­ect­orial debut, Away from Her.

Award cat­egories include Best Picture, Best Male Performance, Best Female Performance, Best Supporting Male Performance, Best Supporting Female Performance, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Canadian Film, Best First Feature, Best Animated Feature, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary Feature.

Nominations will be announced on December 17th, including the three final­ists for Best Canadian Film.

This is just the begin­ning of awards season, so I won’t get into any guessing games about the bulk of the awards, but as far as the single Canadian film to be hon­oured, how about Tout est par­fait (Everything’s Fine), dir­ected by Yves Christian Fournier? (UPDATE: I watched the film and have posted my review. Though it’s a solid enough film, I sus­pect it will be eclipsed by another film from Québec, C’est pas moi, je le jure! (It’s Not Me, I Swear!), men­tioned by Matt MacKinnon in the comments.)

I’m real­izing that “fea­ture” prob­ably excludes docs, but I’m not com­pletely sure. As well, it’s often dif­fi­cult to determine what qual­i­fies a film as “Canadian”. How much of the pro­duc­tion has to be funded by Canadian part­ners? What about films that have Canadian sub­ject matter? Maybe someone can enlighten me.

Not being a par­tic­u­larly astute observer of Canadian films, I’m bound to be missing most of them. What Canadian film from 2008 would you honour with a $10,000 cash prize?

P.S. Hey TFCA, how about updating that web site a bit more often?!

Tagged as: canada

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