RBC and the Toronto International Film Festival this morning announced that Christoph Rainer, of Vienna, Austria, is the national winner of the RBC Emerging Filmmakers Competition.

Rainer receives a $20,000 prize for Requiem for a Robot, which follows an alcoholic robot who, tortured by a recurring nightmare, returns to his creator to find out what has happened.

Canuck filmmakers Dan Popa of Montreal and Kevan Funk of Vancouver each received honourable mentions and $5,000 each.

Popa’s Tales of Santa Fe features a traveler sharing his impressions of a city through a photographic journey into his past, while Funk’s Destroyer follows a young athlete struggling with witnessing his teammates commit an act of violence.

The competition is part of the four-day TIFF Talent Lab, which provides artistic development opportunities to Canadian and international filmmakers. The filmmakers were given $500 cash to develop a one- to five-minute short film for the competition, the theme of which was “memory.”