Tracey Deer’s Beans was the big winner on the final night of the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards, taking home the prizes for best picture and best first feature.

In the best picture category, Beans fended off stiff competition from Funny Boy, The Nest, Underground and Nadia, Butterfly to claim the award. In the John Dunning Best First Feature Film Award, Beans bested The Kid Detective, Tito, Vacarme and Violation.

Co-written by Deer and Meredith Vuchnich and produced by EMA Films’ Anne-Marie Gélinas, the project is inspired by real events and follows a young Mohawk girl who struggles to build her own identity during the 1990 Oka Crisis.

“It was important to me because it doesn’t have to be this hard to be Indigenous in this country. It is really hard. My coming-of-age story was devastating and I wanted people to see it, to witness it. I hope the film motivates Canadians to step up and do the work. To make things better, so that our Indigenous children don’t have coming-of-age stories like this ever again,” said Deer in her acceptance speech.

The award for best director went to Deepa Mehta for Funny Boy, produced by David Hamilton and Hussain Amarshi. The film also claimed prizes for best adapted screenplay (penned by Mehta and Shyam Selvadurai) and best original score (Howard Shore).

The winner of the Ted Rogers Best Feature Length Documentary was Mélanie Carrier and Olivier Higgins’s Wandering: A Rohingya Story (Errance sans retour).

On the night, Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum was the most prolific winner, with the feature picking up six awards, including Achievement in Art Direction (Louisa Schabas, Sylvain Lemaitre), Achievement in Costume Design (Noémi Poulin) and Achievement in Make-Up (Erik Gosselin, Joan-Patricia Parris, Jean-Michel Rossignol, Nancy Ferlatte). The film also won best editing (Jeff Barnaby), best VFX and the best performance by a lead actor for Michael Greyeyes. That brings the film’s total awards haul to seven, after it won Best Stunt Coordination earlier in the week.

Just behind it with five awards was Charles Officer’s Akilla’s Escape, which picked up prizes for best original screenplay (Officer, Wendy Motion Brathwaite), Achievement in Cinematography (Maya Bankovic), Achievement in Casting (Nicole Hilliard-Forde), Achievement in Sound Mixing (Graham Rogers, James Bastable, Brad Dawe, Daniel Moctezuma) and Achievement in Sound Editing (David McCallum, David Rose, Krystin Hunter, William Kellerman).

Elsewhere in the acting categories, Michelle Pfeiffer claimed best actress in a lead role for her performance in French Exit, while Mary Walsh won best supporting actress for Happy Place and Colm Feore won best supporting actor for his role in Sugar Daddy.

Sugar Daddy also won Achievement in Music – Original Song for “Timid Joyous Atrocious,” while Achievement in Hair went to My Salinger Year (Michelle Côté).

Black Bodies (Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, Tamar Bird, Sasha Leigh Henry) took home the prize for Best Live Action Short Drama.