HALIFAX — Philippe Falardeau’s C’est pas moi, je le jure! (It’s Not Me, I Swear), the tale of late ’60s Quebec suburbia through the eyes of a 10-year-old, won best Canadian film and best actor for its young lead, Antoine L’Ecuyer, at the close of the Atlantic Film Festival.

The 28th Atlantic Film Festival closed after 10 days and 254 films screened with an award ceremony on Friday.

Karen LeBlanc won best actress for her role in Charles Officer’s Nurse.Fighter.Boy.

Denis Villeneuve’s Next Floor, already an award winner at the Toronto International Film Festival and at Cannes, won best Canadian short film.

The best Atlantic feature award went to first-time feature director Justin Simms’ Down to the Dirt, the gritty story of an outport Newfoundland rebel and poet. Simms shared the best original screenplay for the film with Sherry White.

Best director and best cinematography went to John Walker and Kent Nason, respectively, for Passage, a docudrama that mixes documentary footage and re-enactments in the story of the search for the Northwest Passage in the mid-18th century.

Nason also won the Rex Tasker documentary award, shared with Teresa MacInnes, for Norm, a National Film Board doc about the struggles of an aging man with Down’s syndrome.

Taking place over the first weekend of AFF, the international copro market Strategic Partners had its most successful year to date, according to organizers, with 50 international production companies, along with 37 from Canada, represented.

‘We’ve done the crossover for Canadian producers to really reach the international market,’ says SP director Jan Miller, who points out that when the program began over a decade ago it was mostly Canadian producers, with only a few international attendees. ‘There was a really interesting mix of American private money and Canadian public money, [figuring out] how they can work together.’

Miller says that it was a panel on the possibilities of web-only programming that really raised some eyebrows.

‘Traditional film and television people hearing success stories of dramas virally reaching 130 million people opened up the brain waves.’