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It would be useful to include in the article, the eligibility criteria for this year's awards. For one thing, date of release: I saw Corbo and Elephant's Song in 2014, but most other films are 2015 releases. For another, I'm curious about Brooklyn (which is a Best Picture nominee at the Oscars); it received two Jutra nominations, for art direction and for cinematography. Was it eligible for those specifically because the cinematographer and art director are residents of Quebec? Or was Brooklyn actually eligible in other categories, but nominated in only two. (The film was mostly shot in Montreal, if I recall correctly; was that relevant to its eligibility?) Mathew5000 (talk) 18:53, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure exactly what the criteria for eligibility are, but I do know that they frequently look a little odd compared to the Canadian Screen Awards — Elephant Song, frex, got some nominations at last year's CSA's even though it's a Quebec Cinema nominee this year, and Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm bumped right up against Mommy at last year's Jutras even though at the CSAs they got their respective nominations in two different years. I suspect the difference is that the CSAs count film festival runs toward eligibility, while the Whatever-The-Hell-We're-Calling-Them-Nows wait for general market release, but I'm not going to assert that in a Wikipedia article until I can find a source which states that outright — for one thing, that theory fails to account for why Felix and Meira and Songs She Wrote About People She Knows, both of which hit TIFF in 2014, are up at CSA #4 instead of CSA #3. It might, in reality, just be a matter of having different cutoff dates during the year — either way, though, when there is a difference it always seems to work with the Quebec awards nominating a film the year after the CSAs do, and I'm not aware offhand of any example of the reverse being true. What can I say...the Canadian film industry is just plain weird sometimes.
Any film is eligible for this award if it's made with the participation of the Quebec film industry, so having been shot in Montreal definitely had bearing on Brooklyn's eligibility — I'm pretty sure it was eligible to be considered in any category that people wanted to vote for it in, although the fact that it was an English-language rather than French-language film quite likely worked against it in some of the higher profile categories. Bearcat (talk) 23:01, 17 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I checked the official rules (page 9 of this pdf). The rules vary depending on whether the film is classed under "Productions québécoises", "Coproductions majoritaires québécoises", or "Coproductions minoritaires québécoises". If it's a minority-Quebec coproduction (e.g. Brooklyn), then only the québecois artists can be nominated in their category, and the film is not eligible for Best Picture. (The term québécois in this context is precisely defined, based on legal domicile for citizens, or fiscal residence for non-citizens.) They also published a list of which films are minority-Quebec coproductions [1].
As for which year, it's quite simply commercial release in a theatre in the province of Quebec, for a duration of at least one week, between January 1 and December 31 of the year preceding the Gala. I think the CSA eligibility is more complex than that. Mathew5000 (talk) 19:37, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Bearcat: This is a bit off-topic now but just to answer your question about the CSA eligibility, the rules are here (note also some aspects of the rules were just changed for this year, there is a separate pdf summarizing them). As I understand it, producers have a choice of basing their submission on either one full week of commercial screenings in a specified Canadian city, during the calendar year, or acceptance into at least two Academy-approved Canadian film festivals during the calendar year. So taking Felix and Meira as an example, it was at TIFF 2014 (and made Canada's Top Ten for 2014) but was it accepted into any other Canadian film festivals in 2014? Even if it did have two acceptances in Academy-approved Canadian film festivals in 2014, the producers I guess had the option of waiting, and not submitting the film for the CSAs until after its commercial release during calendar year 2015. The new rule this year at the CSA has a 1.5 year limit from "first public exposure". So I guess that means if your film had its world premiere at Sundance this year (January 2016), but has no other festival screenings and eventually has a commercial release in Canada in 2018, then it would not be eligible at all for the CSAs. But if your film premieres at TIFF this year (September 2016), and has no other festival screenings but then has a commercial release in Canada in 2018, it would be eligible for CSA #7. (I think this is what they mean by "A film may only enter if its first public exposure (through festivals and/or theatrical release) was within 1.5 years of current eligibility period." But it would be less ambiguous if they had phrased it "... within 1.5 years of the start of the current eligibility period ...". Mathew5000 (talk) 20:07, 21 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
