Ian Harnarine has won Telefilm Canada’s Pitch This! competition and $10,000 prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, for Doubles With Slight Pepper (pictured).

Harnarine delivered a six-minute pitch for a feature-length format of the film to a jury of industry professionals on Tuesday afternoon at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Doubles With Slight Pepper follows a young man who struggles to support himself and his mother by selling doubles (a quintessential Trinidadian street food), and who becomes conflicted when his estranged father unexpectedly arrives, needing his help to save his father’s life.

As a short film, Doubles With Slight Pepper won best Canadian short film at last year’s festival and best live action short drama at the 2012 Genie Awards.

Unwanted - the pitch

A Canadian with Trinidadian roots based in New York, where he teaches at NYU’s Film School and the physics department, Harnarine is also co-writing Time Traveler with Spike Lee, and an adaptation of Canuck author David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant (a term in Caribbean folklore that means vampire witch).

Elsewhere, director Rama Rau and Storyline Entertainment producer Ed Barreveld received an honourable mention for Unwanted, their documentary about cultures that practice female feticide, and the biological and sociological implications of the practice.

Doubles, Harnarine via Ian Harnarine / Unwanted image via Storyline Entertainment