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Canada dominates Banff Rockie Awards with 39 noms

By Etan Vlessing
April 20, 2015
A raft of homegrown digital series fill out the Canadian contingent to compete against all comers in June.

Canadian series will lead all comers at the 2015 Rockie Awards.

The Banff World Media Festival unveiled 39 nominations for Canadian TV shows ahead of the June event, mainly from entries in digital categories.

U.S. series followed behind with 29 nominations, while British series pulled in 26 nominations.

The digital scripted series categories features nominations for four Canadian web shows: CocoMilk Productions’ Convos With My 2-Year-Old, iThentic and 3 o’clock.tv’s Guidestones: Sunflower Noir, Pitch and Passez Go’s Quart de Vie.

They will vie for top honours with the Swedish digital series Taxi and the American contender Welcome to the Wayne.

There’s also a strong local showing in the digital unscripted series competition, with the Canadian entrants Take 5 Productions’ Secrets of the Vikings and  Global Tourist Productions’ Subway Stories going up against three American web series.

And three Canadian digital extensions grabbed nominations in the interactive fiction category: BON Productions’ Book of Negroes Interactive, the National Film Board of Canada’s CIRCA 1948, and Switch United’s Strange Empire: The Curiosities of Rebecca Blithely.

Also receiving nominations for the interactive nonfiction competition from Canada is Ramona Pringle’s Avatar Secrets, Media Headquarters’ Canada’s Smartest Person and the NFB’s Seven Digital Deadly Sins, produced in association with The Guardian and Jam3.

The Canadian telefilm The Good Sister received a nomination in the best TV movie category, and homegrown Entertainment One and U.K. Greenroom Entertainment’s drama Rogue will vie against stiff U.S. competition from Suits, The Blacklist and How to Get Away with Murder in the best procedural drama competition.

Elsewhere, Peacock Alley Entertainment’s Unusually Thicke will represent Canada in the reality category at Rockie Awards, while Sphere Media Plus and Echo Media’s cop drama 19-2 grabbed a nomination in the serial drama competition.

And two Canadian comedies, Encore Television’s Les Beaux Malaises and Rezolution Pictures’ Mohawk Girls, will compete in the sitcom category in Banff.