Scarborough wins 3 Canadian Screen Awards, including best motion picture

Critical darling Scarborough came out on top at the final night of the 2022 Canadian Screen Awards, winning best motion picture, achievement in direction and performance by an actor in a leading role on Sunday.

Scarborough marked the feature film debut of directors Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson, who received the achievement in direction award. Thirteen-year-old Liam Diaz — who portrayed Bing in the film — is one of the youngest actors in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards to win the award for performance by a leading actor.

In an interview with CBC News, Nakhai said that she and Williamson tried to stay true to the film's source material, the 2017 novel Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez.

"We took a lot of care with the representation, but we also knew that no one film can encompass the breadth of stories within that specific neighbourhood within Scarborough, and then with Scarborough as a whole," Nakhai said.

The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021, tells the story of Bing, Sylvie and Laura, three children who forge a strong friendship over their shared experiences living in an underserved community. 

It was adapted from Catherine Hernandez's 2017 novel of the same name, with the author writing the film's script.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers earned two awards on Sunday for a pair of projects.

She won the award for performance by a leading actress in a film for her role as Niska in Danis Goulet's dystopian allegory Night Raiders. The film is set in a future world where Indigenous children are taken from their families and become wards of a brutal military state.

Tailfeathers also produced and directed the Ted Rogers best feature film documentary, Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy. The film chronicles the community-wide impact of the opioid crisis on the Kainai First Nation in Alberta, where hundreds of lives have been lost to addiction.

"Indigenous people face daily systemic violence in this country," Tailfeathers said in an interview after the ceremony.

"I think it's so important to recognize the strength of our communities and the ways in which people are overcoming such deeply rooted systemic barriers through culture, through community, and doing so in a way that offers healing and hope."

In the television categories, Sort Of won the prize for best comedy. The new series, co-written by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, stars Baig as a gender-fluid millennial who straddles competing identities as a bartender, a babysitter to an affluent family, and the child of Pakistani immigrants.

"It's a really intersectional team ... beyond race and gender and age and sexuality," Baig said. "There is real care around how we're telling these stories."

Fellow writer and director Fab Filippo says the collaborative nature of Sort Of works because the team is focused on listening to each other's ideas.