CBC’s documentary Leonard Cohen: If It Be Your Will won the $25,000 Rogers Prize for Excellence in Canadian Content at the 2025 Rockie Awards International Program Competition on Monday (June 9).

The awards, hosted this year by Canada’s Drag Race season one winner Priyanka (pictured), were held during the Banff World Media Festival (BANFF), running from June 8 to 11.

The Rogers Prize ranks the top Canadian production as determined by the jury of more than 150 senior international industry professionals. This year’s awards included 152 nominees representing 22 nations.

Leonard Cohen: If It Be Your Will, directed by Adrian Wills and Sylvain Lebel, is produced by Toronto-based Peacock Alley Entertainment. It combines archival footage of the Montreal-born Cohen, who died in 2016, and performances from a 2017 concert that celebrated his life.

CBC Gem’s web series Get Up, Aisha (iThentic, Window Dreams Productions) won the Carrie Hunter Emerging Talent Prize for its creators Marushka Almeida, Nisha Khan and Rabiya Mansoor. The award was renamed this year from the Emerging Talent Prize in honour of BANFF’s founding executive director, who died this April. It celebrates a short fiction series, non-fiction series or short film video submission that was not funded by a streamer or network.

In total, Canadian projects won eight out of 34 awards with other honourees including Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics (White Pine Pictures) for the Science & Technology category, the documentary Sugarcane (Impact Partners, Fit Via Vi, Kassie Films, Hedgehog Films) in Crime & Investigative and Crave’s My Dead Mom (LoCo Motion Pictures, Bell Media, Blue Ant Media), winning in Short Form Fiction.

KOTV’s docuseries Être ado (Teenagers), won The Prix Francophone, illico+’s Société distincte (Blachfilms) won Drama Series: Non-English Language and Vestiaires (AMI-Télé, Radio-Canada) won the comedy series equivalent.

BBC’s Ukraine documentary Hell Jumper (Expectation Entertainment) took the Grand Jury Prize, awarded to the highest-scoring project in competition. The Day of the Jackal (Carnival Films, Universal International Studios, Universal Studio Group), another U.K. project, won in Drama Series: English Language and the U.S./U.K. coproduction We Are Lady Parts (Working Title Television, Universal International Studios, Universal Studio Group) won Comedy Series: English Language.

Projects from the U.K. received the most awards with 16 wins including The Traitors (U.K.) (Studio Lambert, BBC) in Competition Series & Game Shows and The Graham Norton Show (So Television) in Comedy & Variety.

The U.S. was runner-up with nine awards including Black Twitter: A People’s History (Onyx Collective) for Docuseries and The Simpsons (20th Television Animation) for Animated Series.

This year’s ceremony also marked the first time that the International Program Competition was combined with the Rockie Gala Awards. The Gala Honours saw the Award of Excellence go to Phil Rosenthal, the Canadian Award of Distinction to Stephan James, Career Achievement Award to Hans Zimmer with South Korea named as the inaugural Country of Honour.

Photo by Kristian Bogner