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Canadian actor-brothers Shamier Anderson (John Wick 4) and Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk) had their stars unveiled on Scarborough’s Walk of Fame. The men were raised in the marginalized Toronto community by a single mother who emigrated to Canada from Jamaica.

“It’s really humbling and flattering to receive something like this in my hometown, at a mall where I grew up, where I shopped, it’s pretty cool,” Anderson told The Hollywood Reporter.

The local Walk of Fame honor for the fast-rising Hollywood stars is more than an exercise in collective positive thinking for an inner-city neighborhood that earlier brought to the world celebrities like Mike Myers, Jim Carrey and The Weeknd.

The brothers are at work via their Bay Mills Studios production banner — named after the community housing project they grew up in Scarborough — on a landmark TV drama set in the inner-city community that is their home away from Hollywood.

Blink49 Studios has partnered with Khaled Hosseini’s literary agency Transatlantic, its second major deal with a management company of the past year.

Under the pact, Blink49 will be handed access to Transatlantic’s author and IP roster to produce original projects, while being given a first-look on international distribution rights to projects that come out of the joint venture alongside Blink49 investor Fifth Season.

Transatlantic represents the likes of The Kite Runner scribe Hosseini along with Iain Reid, Marissa Stapley, Naben Ruthnum, Katherena Vermette, Amy Stuart, Mg Vassanji, Karma Brown, Jesse Thistle, Zoe Whittall, Samra Habib and Catherine Hernandez. Run by Samantha Haywood, it reps more than 800 clients and has offices across the U.S.

Blink49 said the Transatlantic deal is a “first of its kind in Canada.”

“Transatlantic represents some of the best-selling authors and storytellers working in Canada, the U.S. and internationally,” said Blink49 CEO John Morayniss.

The Toronto International Film Festival has hired veteran Canadian media executive Judy Lung as its VP of public relations and communications.

Lung, who starts in the role on Monday, most recently served as director of communications for Canadian exhibition giant Cineplex.

Over her 20-year career, Lung has handled public relations and communications for some of Canada’s leading arts and entertainment organizations. Her recent publicity campaigns span titles such as “Scarborough,” which is based on the novel by Catherine Hernandez, and David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future.”

Lung previously worked for TIFF in 2008 before moving on to roles with Corus Entertainment, Shaw Communications, Shaftesbury and Touchwood PR.

Recently, Lung served on the board of advocacy group Bipoc TV & Film and was instrumental in its growth, leading the incorporation of the non-profit as well as the development and launch of HireBIPOC, an online database created in partnership with Bell Media...

The very first email Toronto filmmaker Clement Virgo received on Wednesday morning was from Scarborough author Catherine Hernandez.

“It said, ‘Congratulations. Well deserved’,” Virgo tells Et Canada. “At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.”

Then he checked the news and saw that his movie “Brother”, a coming-of-age story set in Scarborough that he wrote and directed, received 14 Canadian Screen Awards nominations, topping all nods in the film category.

Read More: Exclusive: Clement Virgo’s ‘Brother’ Explores Growing Up Amid Toronto’s Pulsing ’90s Hip-Hop Scene

Just as Hernandez’s book was turned into an acclaimed film (2021’s “Scarborough”), “Brother” is an adaptation of a 2017 novel by David Chariandy. It follows two sons of Caribbean immigrants as they grow into young men while traversing Toronto’s ’90s hip hop scene. Among the CSA nods it received were Best Motion Picture and Achievement in Direction.

“It feels heartening and overwhelming.

The 14th Annual Santa Fe International Film Festival has announced its juried award winners for the event which has run from Oct. 19-23.

More than 100 filmmakers have traveled to the Land of Enchantment state to show off their cinematic wares.

Says SFiFF Artistic Director Jacques Paisner, “We play strange movies, small movies and foreign films, and the audience is keen on a chance to see something they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”

Courtesy of Santa Fe International Film Festival A scene from Godfrey Reggios Once Within a Time.

Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award tonight is Qatsi trilogy filmmaker Godfrey Reggio who is here with his new documentary, scored by longtime collaborator Phillip Glass and edited by Jon Kane, Once Within a Time. The pic is billed as a “fantasy of the real with themes of climate change and the perils of technology, and their effects on future generations. It is geared...

"This film is etched on my heart." LevelFIlm in Canada has unveiled the first official trailer for a Canadian indie feature film titled Scarborough, which first premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival to some effusive reviews. Three kids in a low-income neighbourhood find friendship and community in an unlikely place. This "life-affirming drama" is based on the critically-acclaimed novel of the same name by Catherine Hernandez. It's a remarkably powerful and moving film about connection, about the "collective refusal to be fractured by individual challenges and instead be brought together through kindness and solidarity." TIFF adds: "the directors' exacting attention to detail frames the vibrant, rapidly changing neighbourhood with a universality and compassion that makes the film strikingly humanistic." It stars Liam Diaz, Essence Fox, Anna Claire Beitel, Felix Jedi Ingram Isaac, Ellie Posadas, and Cherish Violet Blood. It's one of the best Canadian films from TIFF last year and it's worth a watch.

Taking place in the shadows of the Greater Toronto area and a liminal space of poverty, Scarborough isn’t an easy film to shake. A local, low-budget indie premiering in TIFF’s Discovery section, written by Catherine Hernandez (based on her novel) and directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson, the film traces three turbulent childhoods of three families grappling with a system that has set them up to fail and fall through the cracks. Opening with late-night escapes from abusive situations and into housing insecurity, it bursts with a raw immediacy. Shot and edited by co-director Rich Williamson, he brings a Frederick Wiseman-esque sensibility to certain moments within formal institutions—doctors’ offices and a daycare that become a sanctuary beyond their intention.

Scarborough primarily focuses on three young children: Bing (Liam Diaz), a gifted Filipino boy ushered away from his mentally ill father by his loving mother; Laura...

Years ago, Catherine Hernandez would attend the Toronto International Film Festival by ushering in ticket-holders at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre for a little more than $6 an hour. This year, the author is back at TIFF as something of a celebrity herself, with the worldwide debut of the film “Scarborough.”

When the independent movie screens on Sept. 10, it gives voice to racialized and under-privileged community members in the notorious Toronto suburb, capturing their spirit as they desperately try to keep themselves together under the thumb of a system that’s designed to see them fail. Hernandez penned the script adaptation from her eponymous 2017 award-winning book, which is loosely based on her experiences running a home daycare in Scarborough.

While the novel introduces several character perspectives, the film — for which LevelFilm has picked up Canadian distribution rights — follows three children over the course of one school year. There’s Bing...