There was electricity in the air some 22 years ago when renowned German indie filmmaker Wim Wenders thrust Atom Egoyan into the global spotlight by giving him his $5,000 first prize during the closing press conference at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where the young cinéaste was ‘discovered.’

In 1987, Wenders was so impressed with Egoyan’s third feature, Family Viewing – an irreverent and voyeuristic take on family disintegration and sexual frustration filtered through a lens of omnipresent video technology – that when he was awarded the Prix Alcan for Wings of Desire, he publicly turned the prize over to the unknown filmmaker.

‘Wim won the $5,000 prize, and to the surprise of everyone, he declared, ‘I’d like to give this money to a new filmmaker that represents the rise of a new independent Canadian cinema,’ and he gave the prize to Atom right on the spot,’ recalls Nouveau Cinéma director Claude Chamberlan.

The astonishing move stunned all of us in attendance and made Egoyan’s name famous on the fest circuit overnight.

‘Then Atom repeated the same gesture in Toronto that was given to him in Montreal,’ Chamberlan reminisces. ‘Atom gave his prize to a B.C. filmmaker, and that prize was $25,000! It’s an amazing story.’

At the closing press conference of the 1991 Toronto Festival of Festivals, Egoyan gave his $25,000 cheque for best Canadian film for The Adjuster to B.C. filmmaker John Pozer for his prolific black-and-white, UBC student feature The Grocer’s Wife, which launched that director’s career.

Pozer was reached in Los Angeles, where he’s negotiating a deal for his upcoming horror/thriller The Zipper (ideally to be shot in his home base B.C. this summer), and he vividly remembers that ‘mind-numbing announcement that Atom was going to hand his cheque over to me.’

‘It put me in shock and was a life-changing moment,’ Pozer recalls. ‘To be helped by Canada’s pre-eminent filmmaker was very humbling. It’s made me forever grateful to him.’