Black Ace, a feature film in development about Canadian sports trailblazer Herb Carnegie, won Telefilm Canada’s 4th Pitch This! competition at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was one of six pitched at the Sutton Place Hotel, weeded down from 72 submissions, and earned its filmmakers $10,000.

Pitched by Damian Rosnick, on behalf of himself and partners Michael Baker and Tyson Bidner, Black Ace is based on the book A Fly in a Pail of Milk, about Carnegie, one of Canada’s first black hockey players. Hindered by his race while trying to penetrate the very white NHL in the 1940s and ’50s, the closest Carnegie ever got to the bigs was playing for the New York Rangers’ minor league franchise. Carnegie, now 80 years old and blind, was in attendance.

While the jury deliberated, some in the audience believed Jane Welowszky’s pitch for Just a Couple of Dicks would take the prize, based on its fun ideas and star power. The story is about two Scottish brothers (to be played by SCTV’s Dave Thomas and real-life brother, musician Ian Thomas) who each hit rock bottom, move back in with their mother and run their father’s private eye agency.

Paul James McLaughlin’s pitch of The Fox Sisters, about Canadian siblings Margaretta and Kate Fox, who founded the modern spiritualist movement, included a live psychic reading with an audience member.

Andrea Dorfman and Jennifer Deyell pitched The Creme de la Creme, about a group of misfit girls at a private school, while Fergus Cook pitched One Eyed Bluff, about drug-runners in Newfoundland. Jonathan Sagall and Robert Budreau pitched Lipstikka, about 15 years in the relationship of two Jewish women that begins in Nazi-friendly, 1940s Paris.