Zacharias Kunuk’s Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) won the Best Canadian Feature Film Award at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The awards were unveiled at a ceremony on Sunday (Sept. 14), the festival’s closing day.

Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) (Kingulliit Productions) world-premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, and had its North American premiere as a TIFF special presentaton  It is produced by Jonathan Frantz, Samuel Cohn-Cousineau and Carol Kunnuk, and co-written by Kunuk and Cohn-Cousineau. Set 4,000 years in the past, the film follows a young couple who are separated, despite their marriage being promised by their families at birth.

In a statement, the awards jury praised the ancient love story from the Inuk filmmaker as “a beautiful and not unexpected achievement from a master storyteller.”

The Best Canadian Feature Film Award comes with a cash prize of $10,000. Min Sook Lee’s documentary There Are No Words (National Film Board of Canada) received an honourable mention in the category.

Writer-director Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron (Nine Behind Productions, Boddah) — fresh off its win of the Swatch First Feature Award at the Locarno Film Festival — was named the winner of TIFF’s Best Canadian Discovery Award.

The award comes with a $10,000 prize, and is eligible for all Canadian filmmakers attending the festival with their first or second feature. Kunsang Kyirong‘s feature debut 100 Sunset received an honourable mention.

Blue Heron follows a young girl and her Hungarian family, whose eldest son displays increasing behavioural issues after they relocate to Vancouver Island in the 1990s. The Canada/Hungary coproduction is produced by Romvari, Ryan Bobkin, Gábor Osvath and Sara Wylie.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls (National Film Board of Canada) was presented with the Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film, which comes with a bursary of $10,000. The animated short is directed by Chris Lavis  and Maciek Szczerbowski , and produced for the NFB by Julie Roy, Marc Bertrand and Christine Noël.

Turning to the festival’s audience-voted prizes, Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue was named the winner of the People’s Choice Documentary Award.

Produced by Avrich and Mark Selby under their Toronto-based Melbar Entertainment Group banner, the film chronicles a retired Israeli general’s solo mission to rescue his family during the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The award comes after the film’s controversial journey to the festival, which saw it pulled from the lineup before being slated for a single screening following an international outcry.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie won over late-night audiences to take the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award.

Produced by Matthew Miller and Matt Greyson of Toronto’s Zapruder Films, the comedy mockumentary sees Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarrol reprising their characters from Nirvanna the Band the Show. The film debuted at Austin’s SXSW in March, and made its Canadian premiere at TIFF.

The People’s Choice Award, often considered a bellwether for Academy Awards success, went to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Two Netflix features followed as runners-up: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

The International People’s Choice Award was presented to South Korea’s Park Chan-wook for No Other Choice.

Finally, the juried Platform Award, which comes with a $20,000 prize, was awarded to Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Ukraine/Lithuania copro To the Victory!

The 51st edition of TIFF will run from Sept. 10 to 20, 2026.

Image courtesy of TIFF