Environmental doc earns double praise from film critics

The Toronto Film Critics Association handed out Canada’s richest film prize, the $100,000 Rogers Award for best Canadian film, to directors Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier on Tuesday night for their film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.

Anthropocene was also a winner among Vancouver film critics, who chose it as best documentary at their awards ceremony held Monday. At the Toronto event, the winners promptly gave the money away.

In an only-in-Canada moment, Baichwal praised the other two nominees (Ava, a first feature by Sadaf Foroughi, and the documentary Maison du Bonheur from Sofia Bohdanowicz) and then announced that she and her co-directors would split the prize money three ways with these deserving, smaller-budget productions.

Furthermore, Anthropocene’s share of the prize would go to the Toronto festival’s Share Her Journey program, which is working to help increase opportunities for women in the film industry. Notably, all three nominated films this year were directed or co-directed by women.

Baichwal is a three-time winner of the Rogers prize. She and Burtynsky won in 2013 for their film Watermark, and she was also the recipient in 2006 for Manufactured Landscapes, though the prize that year had no cash value.

Anthropocene, which included exhibits at the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario, continues her theme of exploring the way humankind is modifying the planet through large-scale construction.

The Toronto critics’ group also celebrated award winners Tantoo Cardinal, whose body of acting work over more than five decades earned her the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour award; writer/director Molly McGlynn, winner of the Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist; and Morgan Neville, winner of the RBC Allan King Documentary Award for his film Won’t You Be My Neighbor, about TV’s Mr. Rogers. The group also named Genevieve Citron the recipient of its first emerging critic award.

The Vancouver Film Critics Circle named the Haida-language drama Edge of the Knife best Canadian feature. It is billed as the first feature-length film made in the endangered Haida language.

Edge of the Knife took four prizes from the ceremony on Monday, including best director and best B.C. film.