Kazik Radwanski’s Anne At 13,000 Ft. won the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film award at the Toronto Film Critics Association’s first virtual awards gala Tuesday night (March 9).
Writer/director Radwanski accepted the award – the country’s highest-value arts prize – remotely. The intense, empathetic drama stars Deragh Campbell as a young daycare worker spiralling through an unspecified mental illness.
“This is a lot of money for us,” Radwanski said. “This is a third of our budget, it’s going to really help us start working on the next project.”
The runners-up, Louise Archambault’s late-life drama And The Birds Rained Down and Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’s psychological thriller White Lie, each received $5,000.
Anne At 13,000 Ft. was scheduled to open in Canadian cinemas on March 20, 2020, only to see that release scuttled when the pandemic shut down the country. The film ultimately debuted on TIFF’s streaming platform last month. Radwanski thanked Campbell, his producers and his publicists for never giving up and keeping Anne alive over “this virtual year.”
“It just means so much to have the film still have a life, and still connect, and be written about. We’re a group of movie lovers – we love watching movies – and we can’t wait to be back in a movie theatre, and for movies to be screening in theatres again.”
The announcement arrived at the end of the TFCA’s first prepackaged awards show, an experiment necessitated by the pandemic. Hosted by CTV’s Lainey Lui and Refinery29’s Kathleen Newman-Bremang at the Paradise Theatre, and filmed in February under COVID safety protocols, the first half of the gala featured segments in which two TFCA members – seated at opposite ends of the row – set up video acceptance messages from the winners of various categories.
That stuff was… fine, though it threatened to get a little monotonous. (The Paradise is a splendid place to watch movies, but a roomful of dark seats in low light isn’t exactly eye-popping.) But the gala really got rolling once the critics stopped talking and the focus shifted to the filmmakers.
Accepting the Jay Scott prize for an emerging artist, filmmaker Kelly Fyffe-Marshall – whose searing short Black Bodies exploded out of TIFF last year – urged the audience to “make ripples where you are – make ripples within your family unit, within your school, within your workplace, your community, your friendship circles, to make this world a safer space for Black and Indigenous folk.”
Jason Ryle received the Clyde Gilmour award for a Canadian whose work has in some way enriched the understanding and appreciation of film in their native country. The outgoing executive director of the imagineNATIVE festival, Ryle was also instrumental in creating the On-Screen Protocols And Pathways media production guide, designed to support Indigenous artists in film and television and provide guidance to productions working with First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities.
“My career so far has been somewhat unexpected,” Ryle said. “I’ve had no real master plan in terms of the work that I’ve done, but I’ve always hoped that my work in some way has contributed positively to community. The Indigenous community, of course, but also to our larger, shared industry.”
“There’s been so much change in our sector here in Canada,” Ryle said, “and there’s so much more to come. There’s so much building that needs to be done, there’s so much work that needs to happen, and there are so many stories to tell. And this is a beautiful, exciting time for us in the industry, and I look forward to hearing many, many more stories by Indigenous filmmakers.”
A montage of Zoom chats offered past and present Jay Scott Prize honorees Ashley McKenzie, Albert Shin, Fyffe-Marshall and Campbell, and last year’s Rogers Best Canadian Film Award winners Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn (The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open) the chance to ask each other questions about production and the creative process.
Another segment found filmmaker RT Thorne (the gala’s creative director) moderating a Zoom panel with TIFF artistic director and co-head Cameron Bailey, filmmakers Tracey Deer, Alicia K. Harris, Jennifer Holness and Rama Rau, actor/producers Samantha Kaine and Kathleen Munroe and NOW culture editor and film critic Radheyan Simonpillai. The discussion focused on the need for a more diverse body of film critics in order to fully engage with the work of diverse filmmakers, building on multiple calls over the course of the evening for the TFCA to add more diverse critics to its own roster.
(In addition to myself and Rad, NOW’s Susan G. Cole, Kevin Ritchie and Glenn Sumi are also members of the TFCA.)
The majority of the association’s awards, including Nomadland’s three prizes for best picture, best director (Chloé Zhao) and best actress (Frances McDormand), were announced last month, with only the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award held back for the gala.
The entire production is available to watch on YouTube.
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