Anthropocene wins best Canadian film award
Environmental doc chosen by Toronto critics for $100,000 Rogers prize
Anthropocene: The Human Ep
och, a film that chronicles humankind’s devastating impact on the environment, has been awarded the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award by the Toronto Film Critics Association.
The award, the biggest annual prize in Canadian cinema, was given to filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier at the association’s annual gala Tuesday night by actor, writer and director Don McKellar. Photographer Edward Burtynsky shares the prize with them. Runners-up Maison du bon
heur by director Sofia Bohdanowicz (winner of last year’s Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist) and Ava by director Sadaf Foroughi each received $5,000 from Rogers Communications.
It was the third win for Baichwal, who previously won Best Canadian Film for Manufac
tured Landscapes in 2006 and the 2013 Rogers Best Canadian Film prize (with Burtynsky) for Watermark.
Baichwal and de Pencier announced from the stage they were giving away their prize, splitting it three ways between Bohdanowicz, Foroughi and the TIFF Share Her Journey fund to support female filmmakers.
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch presents a vision of environmental ruin on an unprecedented scale, with a profound and disturbing beauty,” said Rogers vice-chair Philip B. Lind.
The association gave its Best Picture prize to Roma and named Alfonso Cuaron Best Director for the film. Other winners include: Won’t You Be My Neighbour? by Morgan Neville, awarded the $5,000 RBC Allan King Documentary Film Award.
Writer/director Molly McGlynn, who received the $10,000 Stella Artois Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist.
Indigenous actor Tantoo Cardinal, who received the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award. As per tradition, the award comes with $50,000 in services from Technicolor, which Cardinal has conferred on writer, director and video artist Darlene Naponse, whose film Falls Around Her, starring Cardinal, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018.
The first ever TFCA Emerging Critic Award was given to Genevieve Citron, creator of the Film Atlas website.