Xavier Dolan, François Arnaud in I Killed My Mother (Regent Releasing)
Xavier Dolan, whose I Killed My Mother is Canada's submission for the 2010 best foreign language film Academy Award, has been chosen as the Toronto Film Critics Association's first recipient of the Jay Scott Prize for emerging talent. The honor includes a cash prize of $5,000.
I Killed My Mother premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won three awards. In the film, 19-year-old filmmaker Dolan plays a gay teenager who has some serious hang-ups with his single mother (Anne Dorval). Also in the film's cast: François Arnaud, as the young man's boyfriend, and Suzanne Clément as his teacher.
The Quebec-based filmmaker is expected to be in Toronto to accept the award from Atom Egoyan at the Toronto critics' annual meeting on January 12. Still to be announced is the $10,000 Rogers Best Canadian Feature Award. Vying for the prize are Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique, about the 1989 Montreal massacre of several female engineering students by a deranged misogynist; Bruce McDonald's horror-comedy Pontypool; and Benoit Pilon's The Necessities of Life, about an Inuit man recovering from tuberculosis at a Quebec City facility in the 1950s.
The Jay Scott Prize is named after the Toronto Globe and Mail film critic who died in 1993.
Source: Northern Stars