Ruba Nadda earned the juried best Canadian feature trophy at the Toronto International Film Festival, which wrapped Saturday, for Cairo Time, a romantic drama that nearly didn’t get made when around $1.5 million in financing fell through on the eve of production.

‘[Producer Daniel Irons] said we were done,’ Nadda recalled Saturday, while clutching her trophy. ‘I begged him to please figure this out, and 48 hours later I was on a plane to Cairo,’ backed by a $2 million project-saving investment from Telefilm Canada.

Now the challenge for Cairo Time is a U.S. theatrical release, the holy grail for indie producers.

And it isn’t alone.

A quiet film market at TIFF with few studio-sized deals ended with most films that came into Toronto without North American distribution deals going home empty-handed.

Now the prices for those films, many with A-list directors and actors like Atom Egoyan’s Chloe and the TIFF opener Creation by British director Jon Amiel, will see their acquisition prices drop until U.S. deals are finally secured, likely at AFM.

Further, a current glut of indie films that produced a buyer’s market at TIFF means Canadian filmmakers will be challenged financing their next projects.

‘There will be fewer films being made. Hopefully they’ll be of higher quality,’ TIFF director Piers Handling said Saturday as the festival handed out its audience and juried awards.

On the awards podium Saturday, Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire picked up the top audience award. The Toronto win is a good Oscar omen for the harrowing New York City drama, which last January picked up the top jury award and the audience award at Sundance. Last year’s audience winner, Slumdog Millionaire, eventually took top honors at the Academy Awards.

Precious, to be released in Canada by Maple Pictures, beat out Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs.

TIFF gave out two other audience awards: the top documentary prize went to New Zealand director Leanne Pooley’s The Topp Twins, which beat out Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones was voted most popular Midnight Madness title in Toronto.

The best Canadian first feature film trophy went to Alexandre Franchi for The Wild Hunt, a historical fantasy picture.

‘This was a wild hunt for us,’ Franchi said after accepting the award. ‘My heart was pounding as the film played in the cinema.’

Pedro Pires earned the best short film prize for Danse Macabre, a morbid ballet based on a concept by Robert Lepage.

‘What a great honor to present the film here and to win this prize. I’m very proud of it,’ Pires told TIFF’s award ceremony at the Intercontinental hotel after around 325 films unspooled in Toronto over 10 days.

The discovery prize, voted on by film critics, went to Indian director Laxmikant Shetgaonkar for The Man Beyond the Bridge, while French director Bruno Dumont earned the FIPRESCI special presentations prize for Hadewijch.

With the awards handed out, TIFF’s Handling offered a sober view of the festival’s crisis-era film market, which produced no all-night bidding wars and only two seven-figure acquisitions: The Weinstein Company’s purchase of Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Sony Worldwide Acquisitions’ buying Canadian Peter Stebbings’ Defendor, both for an estimated $1 million to $2 million.

‘The days of the bidding wars are over to a certain extent. For North American sales, they will take longer in the coming years,’ Handling said.

‘This doesn’t speak to the quality of films as much as where the market is,’ he added.