The Gemini Awards were awards given by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television between 1986–2011 to recognize the achievements of Canada's English-language television industry. The Gemini Awards are analogous to the Emmy Awards given in the United States and the BAFTA Television Awards in the United Kingdom. First held in 1986 to replace the ACTRA Award, the ceremony celebrated Canadian television productions with awards in 87 categories, along with other special awards such as lifetime achievement awards. The Academy had previously presented the one-off Bijou Awards in 1981, inclusive of some television productions.
Saul Hersh Rubinek is a German-born Canadian actor, director, producer, and playwright.
Martyn Burke is a Canadian director, novelist and screenwriter from Toronto, Ontario.
Maureen Judge is a Canadian Screen Awards (CSA) winning filmmaker and television producer. Much of her work is documentary and explores themes of love, betrayal and acceptance in the context of the modern family, with the most recent films focusing on the dreams and challenges of contemporary youth.
Sturla Gunnarsson is an Icelandic-Canadian film and television director and producer.
Peter Kastner was a Canadian-born actor who achieved prominence as a young man in lead roles in the popular 1964 film Nobody Waved Good-bye and in Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 well-received comedy You're a Big Boy Now. He also had a leading role in another film as a young man in 1971 and in a sequel of his debut film in 1984. Additionally, he starred in two short-lived television situation comedy series of 1968 and 1977. Following his promising early success, his career faltered and he became increasingly emotionally troubled in his later years.
Semi Chellas is a director, writer, producer who has written for film, television and magazines. She was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Calgary, Alberta. She is known for her work on the television series Mad Men and her film adaptation of American Woman based on Susan Choi's novel of the same name.
Kenneth Steven Gord is a Canadian film and television producer.
Peter Raymont is a Canadian filmmaker and producer and the president of White Pine Pictures, an independent film, television and new media production company based in Toronto. Among his films are Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2005), A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman (2007), The World Stopped Watching (2003) and The World Is Watching (1988). The 2011 feature documentary West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson and 2009's Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould were co-directed with Michèle Hozer.
David Ridgen is an independent Canadian filmmaker born in Stratford, Ontario. He has worked for CBC Television, MSNBC, NPR, TVOntario and others. He is currently the writer, producer and host of CBC Radio’s true-crime podcast series, Someone Knows Something and The Next Call.
Hangman's Graveyard is a Canadian documentary film which was originally broadcast in Canada on History Television on December 6, 2009. A work-in-progress screening of the film was presented at the Ontario Archaeological Society's 36th annual symposium and as the opening film of DocFest Stratford in October 2009. The film follows an archaeological investigation at Toronto's old Don Jail beginning in September 2007. The archaeologists uncovered a cemetery behind the jail and began a process of identifying the remains. In total, 15 bodies were found, and all are thought to be remains of executed inmates. The archaeological team is led by Dr. Ronald Williamson of Archaeological Services Inc. Produced by Canada's Ballinran Productions, the company behind the Gemini and IFTA nominated documentary Death or Canada, the film follows the lives of three men found in the forgotten cemetery - George Bennett, Jan Ziolko and Frederick Davis - and examines the history of the Don Jail, capital punishment in Canada and the nation's most feared hangman, Arthur Ellis.
Dawna Friesen is a Canadian television journalist, currently the chief anchor and executive editor of Global National. She was previously a foreign correspondent for NBC News.
Joel Gordon is a Canadian actor, producer and director.
David Devine is a film director and producer, specialising in children's films. He was the co-founder and CEO of Devine Entertainment between 1994 and 2013, where he created original content for film, television and digital media.
John Kastner was a four-time Emmy Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker whose later work focused on the Canadian criminal justice system. His films included the documentaries Out of Mind, Out of Sight (2014), a film about patients at the Brockville Mental Health Centre, named best Canadian feature documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival; NCR: Not Criminally Responsible (2013), exploring the personal impact of the mental disorder defence in Canada; Life with Murder (2010), The Lifer and the Lady and Parole Dance, and the 1986 made-for-television drama Turning to Stone, set in the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario.
Jamie Kastner is a Canadian writer, director and documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. His company, Cave 7 Productions, produces both theatrical and television productions. Kastner is best known for his feature documentaries, including There Are No Fakes, which premiered at Hot Docs in 2019, The Skyjacker's Tale (2016) and The Secret Disco Revolution, both of which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Damon Vignale is a Canadian writer, director, and producer working in film and television. He has directed the films Little Brother of War and The Entrance. He released the web series The Vetala in 2009, drawn from the Baital Pachisi, a collection of Sanskrit tales and legends, which received a 2010 Gemini Award. Vignale’s debut documentary film The Exhibition world premiered in the Next Program of the 2013 Hot Docs International Film Festival. The film won the 2014 International Emmy Award for Arts Programming. Vignale's television credits as a writer-producer include ABC/CTV's homicide series Motive, Bravo's police drama 19-2, and the ITV/BritBox series The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco. He is currently a writer and co-executive producer on the Paramount+/CBC medical drama series SkyMed.
The Donald Brittain Award is a Canadian television award, presented by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to honour the year's best television documentary on a social or political topic. Formerly presented as part of the Gemini Awards, since 2013 it has been presented as part of the Canadian Screen Awards. The award may be presented to either a standalone broadcast of a documentary film, or to an individual full-length episode of a news or documentary series; documentary films which originally premiered theatrically, but were not already submitted for consideration in a CSA film category before being broadcast on television, are also considered television films for the purposes of the award.
Turning to Stone is a Canadian docudrama television film, which was broadcast by CBC Television in 1986. Directed by Eric Till and written by Judith Thompson, the film stars Nicky Guadagni as Allison Campbell, a woman who is sent to Ontario's Prison for Women after being set up by her boyfriend to smuggle drugs from Mexico to Canada without her knowledge.
