My Winnipeg

My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s hallucinatory black-and-white love letter to his Manitoba hometown, was crowned the first winner of the TFCA’s new Rogers Best Canadian Feature Award at last night’s gala awards dinner.

This inaugural Rogers award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, was presented to Maddin by actor-filmmaker Sarah Polley — who won the TFCA’s 2007 Best Canadian  Film award for Away from Her — at Toronto’s Nota Bene restaurant.

Also nominated for this year’s award were Continental, a Film without Guns, directed by Stephane Lafleur, and Up the Yangtze, directed by Yung Chang.

“Our three finalists for the year’s Best Canadian Film are all strongly evocative tales of characters adrift in manufactured landscapes,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson, film critic for Maclean’s magazine. “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. We’re immensely grateful to Rogers Communications for endowing the award. With their continued support we look forward to the TFCA awards becoming a landmark celebration of cinema that befits Toronto’s status as a vibrant film capital.”

“Rogers is pleased to sponsor this inaugural prize, and we’re excited by the Toronto Film Critics Association’s choice for Best Canadian Film,” said Phil Lind, Vice Chairman, Rogers Communications Inc. “It’s a wonderful film by a talented filmmaker and crew.”

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