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At the 1969 Canadian Film Awards, one of its jurors, the young British director Peter Watkins, declared that there was no Canadian film industry. There could hardly have been a more damning, or more humiliating, moment for such a charge to land. The CFA is a government-funded institution created with the express intent of legitimizing (and, by extension, catalyzing) a homegrown film industry. But Watkins’s complaint was legitimate: for the first time in the CFA’s twenty-year history, there were no feature films for him or his fellow jurors to view. Watkins also levied aesthetic...