Daniel Cockburn and Daniel Bekerman’s The Engineers is the winner of this year’s Pitch This! competition, and recipient of $15,000 from Telefilm Canada to develop the project.

Six producer-director teams pitched their projects in six minutes to an industry jury at the Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto on Monday, as part of the Pitch This! competition, with the winner announced shortly after.

The Engineers is the story of a crime novelist who hires actors to attend therapy “in character” and report their insights and epiphanies to him, as he tries to gain a deep understanding of his characters. However, his experiment takes on a life of its own.

“Every producer looks for directors that excite them on every level – on an artistic level, on a commercial level. To me, working with Daniel is the definition of a fulfilling producer-director experience,” Bekerman told Playback immediately following the announcement.

As for the next steps, the team is developing the project with the CFC, and plans to work on the script over the next few months.

“We want to move fairly quickly; hopefully we’ll be shooting at some point next year,” Bekerman said.

He added that the project is an “actor’s dream,” in that “it’s literally about uncovering depth of character.”

The Pitch This! prize will go largely towards casting, he added.

Scythia Films’ Bekerman is also the producer of Bruce McDonald’s The Husband, which had its world premier at TIFF on Sept. 9. Cockburn’s first feature, You Are Here, took the top prize at the 2011 European Media Art Festival.