The way Noah Cowan sees it, one of the best things about the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival was the success of Canada’s lesser-known filmmakers.

The TIFF co-director, speaking shortly after last month’s 10-day fest (Sept. 7-16), says some people in the industry had been nervous because the lineup lacked films by traditional A-listers such as Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg.

‘But the result was spectacular. It meant a whole new generation of filmmakers were getting lavish attention from the media and the industry,’ he says, citing the ‘big huge scores’ for Norman Cohn’s and Zacharias Kunuk’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her and Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, among others.

Away from Her was a big sales winner among domestic films, going to 27 territories, including a U.S. sale to Lionsgate, which came as ‘a bit of a shock,’ says producer Daniel Iron.

The film – about an elderly couple separated by Alzheimer’s disease – is expected in theaters in spring 2007.

‘The feeling was that there’s not enough time to get a campaign together this year,’ says Iron, given the need to target higher-minded, older audiences. ‘It needs a careful release.’

The film also played well with critics, although the win for best Canadian feature and $30,000 went to Manufactured Landscapes, a ‘profoundly evocative’ documentary of photographer Edward Burtynsky, according to the TIFF jury.

Montreal director Noël Mitrani, meanwhile, took the prize for best first Canadian feature and $15,000 for Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi, about a soccer player looking for solace after the death of his girlfriend. ‘A rare treat,’ says the jury, marked by wit and compassion.

TIFF’s People’s Choice award, based on audience votes, went to Bella by U.S. director and writer Alejandro Gomez Monteverde, while the Discovery award and $10,000 went to first-time filmmaker Joachim Trier of Norway for his comical debut Reprise.

A jury of critics also handed the FIPRESCI award to the highly controversial Death of a President, the mock doc of George W. Bush by U.K. director Gabriel Range. The prize is awarded to a new filmmaker who makes his or her debut at the festival and went to DOAP for ‘the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth.’

The picture created a big stir at TIFF, something Cowan says he could have done without, lamenting that the media seemed at times to lose sight of the movies themselves in favor of ‘Death of a Smoking Borat’ – a compact reference to DOAP, the noise-making Borat comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen, and the debacle that saw the Sutton Place Hotel fined $600 because actor Sean Penn smoked a cigarette during the press conference for All the King’s Men.

‘For me, there was too much [noise] this year,’ he says.

‘zer Kiziltan’s Takva – A Man’s Fear of God won the cultural innovation award, while Maxime Giroux won best Canadian short for Les Jours.

www.bell.ca/filmfest