The two top nominees for the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's 2008 Genie Awards are heavy dramas: David Cronenberg's Russian mafia thriller Eastern Promises and Roger Spottiswoode's Rwanda genocide tale Shake Hands With the Devil, each with 12 nominations.
They were followed by Away from Her with seven nods; The Tracey Fragments with six; Continental, a Film Without Guns and Silk, both with five; and Days of Darkness with four.
The violent Eastern Promises, which is up for the best British film BAFTA (it's a co-production), stars American Viggo Mortensen and Australian Naomi Watts as two disparate people — he a Russian hitman; she a midwife — whose paths are crossed following the death of a pregnant 14-year-old girl. Mortensen, director David Cronenberg, supporting actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, and screenwriter Steve Knight are all up for Genies.
Shake Hands with the Devil is based on the autobiography of Lit. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the military commander of the UN mission in Rwanda during the spring of 1994. Roy Dupuis (right), the star of the highly popular and multiple-Genie winner The Rocket, plays Dallaire.
Shake Hands with the Devil covers similar ground to Peter Raymont's 2003 documentary, also about Dallaire's work in Rwanda and also titled Shake Hands with the Devil. Both productions depict world inaction — or rather, disregard — while radical Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis (and non-radical Hutus) following the death of Rwanda's ethnic Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana in a mysterious plane crash.
Among the seven nominations for Away from Her, are those for director and screenwriter Sarah Polley (who adapted Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"), British actress Julie Christie — this year's likely Academy Award winner — and Gordon Pinsent (above, with Christie), who, perhaps because he's not a "name" south of the border, has been utterly ignored by the many American award-giving organizations.
Though directed by a Canadian (Jason Reitman) and starring two Canadians (Ellen Page and Michael Cera), Juno wasn't submitted for Genie consideration by Fox Searchlight. As an American production, it quite likely would have been deemed ineligible for the awards.
Ellen Page, who is up for a best actress Oscar for Juno, did land a Genie nomination as well, but for The Tracey Fragments (above), which uses split screens to tell the inner story of a 15-year-old girl (Page will be turning 21 next February) coming to terms with impending adulthood and her budding sexuality. Directed by Bruce McDonald, who has handled several episodes of the American Queer As Folk, The Tracey Fragments was adapted by Maureen Medved from her own novel. Both McDonald and Medved were also shortlisted.
Denys Arcand's French-language Days of Darkness, about a civil servant with a wild imagination, was one of the nine films shortlisted in the (American) Academy's best foreign-language film category — though it ultimately failed to land an Oscar nod. The Canadian Academy, however, found it good enough to merit nominations for best film, best director, best actor (Marc Labrèche), and best original screenplay (also Arcand).
Although in the last couple of years Quebecois productions such as C.R.A.Z.Y., Bon Cop, Bad Cop, and The Rocket have dominated the Genies, this year the focus has been on English-language productions. In fact, the top four nominated films all have English dialogue.
The 2008 Genie Awards ceremony will take place on Monday, March 3, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. For the first time ever, the Genie Awards will be broadcast (at least in Canada) on E! and IFC.