The 2023 Allegra Audience Choice Awards have been announced, with an award given for Best Short Film and Best Canadian Feature Film.

The winner for Best Short Film is BECOMING TOM THOMSON, a documentary about an actor researching a character for an upcoming feature film that is inspired by Canadian wilderness painter Tom Thomson who died mysteriously in Algonquin Park in 1917. Local Milton actor and filmmaker Steve Belford, who has participated in the Milton Film Festival since its first year, chronicles his experience as he learns to paint, canoe and fish while scouting some of the locations that inspired the Canadian icon and gaining first hand experience about what might have taken the young artist’s life.

Belford had several of the paintings he created while making the film on display at the Holcim Gallery during the Festival.

The winner of the Best Canadian Feature Award is another documentary, THE LONG RIDER, directed by Sean Cisterna and featuring Brazilian-born cowboy Filipe Masetti Leite – a long rider who is the youngest person in the world to cross the Americas entirely on horseback. The film chronicles Leite’s 8 year odyssey of over 25,000 kms across 12 international borders, and sees the young immigrant battle intense heat, drought, speeding transport trucks, nature’s wrath and corrupt border guards on his history-making long ride home.

Festival audiences were treated to an interactive Q&A session with both Cisterna and Leite following the screening.

The Allegra Audience Choice Awards are generously sponsored by the Anders family of Allegra Marketing.Print.Mail. Audience members are able to rate the qualifying films from one to five stars on a ballot, and the winner is chosen by the highest average rating.