Guy Maddin film wins $10,000 prize
Guy Maddin’s bizarre tribute to his hometown, My Winnipeg, has won a new $10,000 film prize.
The avant-garde director was given the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, presented by the Toronto Film Critics Association. A gala dinner was scheduled Tuesday to recognize the association’s favourite releases of 2008.
Sarah Polley, whose film, Away From Her was named best Canadian feature last year, was due to present the award to Maddin in front of an audience expected to include heavyweight filmmakers including Atom Egoyan, Robert Lantos, Bruce McDonald and Don McKellar.
Other films in the running were Stephane Lafleur’s film, Continental: A Film Without Guns, and Yung Chang’s acclaimed documentary Up the Yangtze, about the issues surrounding the Three Gorges Dam in China.
“Our three finalists for the year’s Best Canadian Film are all strongly evocative tales of characters adrift in manufactured landscapes,” association president Brian Johnson, film critic for Maclean’s magazine, said in a release.
“My Winnipeg gleefully obliterates the line between fact and fiction, documentary and drama between lucid memoir and fevered dream. It’s an exquisitely Canadian film that has won praise from around the world, and we are pleased to add our voice to the acclaim with this inaugural prize.”
Established in 1997, the Toronto Film Critics Association is comprised of Toronto-based journalists and broadcasters who specialize in film criticism and commentary.
Categories