Damon D’Oliveira and producing trio Sara Blake, Magali Gillon-Krizaj and Tyler Hagan emerged victorious at the Canadian Media Producers Association’s annual Indiescreen Awards.

D’Oliveira (pictured left) of Conquering Lion Pictures won the $20,000 Established Producer Award, while Blake, Gillon-Krizaj and Hagan of SSMT Productions took the $10,000 Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Award at a ceremony presented in partnership with Telefilm Canada at the Whistler Film Festival on Friday (Dec. 2).

A producer for 25 years, D’Oliveira was honoured for “depicting authentic voices on screen,” according to a news release. His credits include the CBC series The Book of Negroes (2015) and the films Poor Boy’s Game (2007), The Grizzlies (2018) and Brother, which premiered at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was written and directed by his Conquering Lion Pictures’ business partner, Clement Virgo.

In his Indiescreen Awards’ acceptance speech, D’Oliveira thanked Brother partners Aeschylus Poulos and Sonya Di Rienzo of Toronto’s Hawkeye Pictures, as well as Virgo and author David Chariandy, whose 2017 novel Brother inspired the coming-of-age film about two Jamaican-Canadian brothers.

“In a way I feel [Brother] is the culmination of a lot of work that Clement and I have done in Canada,” he said. “When I first read David’s novel, I was amazed at how it echoed my own upbringing in Scarborough in a Guyanese-Canadian family led by a matriarch at a time when there a lot of immigrants coming from the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, we made this film for our immigrant mothers — that’s the dedication on the film.”

Blake, Gillon-Krizaj and Hagan (pictured right) won their prize for “their impressive filmmaking achievements, delivering important and artistically groundbreaking films, and for the remarkable synergy evident in their collective project, Until Branches Bend,” said the release. Until Branches Bend, directed by Sophie Jarvis, also premiered at TIFF 2022 and won Best BC Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

This was the first in-person Indiescreen Awards since 2019, following two years of virtual ceremonies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To be eligible, nominees must have been lead producer on a Canadian feature film that premiered in the 2022 calendar year.

The nominees and winners were selected by two national juries chaired by last year’s CMPA Indiescreen Award winners, Anand Ramayya, Kate Kroll, and Rylan Friday.