Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Prince George movie producer up for national award

Norm Coyne is up for a Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) Indiescreen award.
norm-coyne-nominated-for-award-nov-2022
Norm Coyne, Prince George movie producer, has been nominated for a national award.

A Prince George movie producer is up for a Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) Indiescreen award.

Best known for being the brainchild behind Northern FanCon and bringing Prince George in front of entertainment industry leaders, Norm Coyne is up for a CMPA Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Award along with four others.

Coyne got the nod for Barker Street Cinema’s The Way to the Heart, a full feature romance that showcased just how beautiful the Prince George landscape is and all the talent located here.

The Way to the Heart is a movie about a big-city chef who has lost her creative spark. To save her job, she returns to her hometown where she can once again find her passion for food.

“To garner a nomination like this is such an honour,” Coyne said. “We’ve been at this since 2012 but haven’t really gotten momentum until the last couple of years so it’s pretty cool.”

Coyne said he’s spent years cementing Prince George as a shooting location to industry leaders and he believes that’s part of the reason he got the nomination.

“Two of the last four movies that have been shot in Prince George were mine but the other two I didn’t work on at all,” Coyne explained.

“But because there was already an infrastructure it made it easier for others to produce their films. Right now I am in talks with two other producers about potentially shooting more films in Prince George, so right now there’s almost like a critical mass where we can look back and say ‘hey, look at what we did with Great North Christmas, hey look what we did with the Way to the Heart and these are the things you can showcase in Prince George’. There’s also a more robust local crew community – that’s not to say there wasn’t before but now we took some time to articulate it for others as well as developing it for our own projects. I think of myself as an opportunity farmer.”

Coyne said he’d keep us posted on how he does at the Canadian Media Producers awards at the Whistler Film Festival Dec. 2.

Here's the list of Kevin Tierney Emerging Producer Award nominees:

  • Katie Bird Nolan, Lindsay Tapscott (Babe Nation Films) – Alice, Darling
  • Sara Blake, Magali Gillon-Krizaj, Tyler Hagan (SSMT Productions) – Until Branches Bend
  • Norm Coyne (Barker Street Cinema) – The Way to the Heart
  • Shant Joshi (Fae Pictures) – Framing Agnes
  • Alexandra Roberts, Danny Sedore (Push Pictures) – Soft