The Gemini Awards are annual television broadcasting industry awards in Canada.

First awarded in 1986, the Geminis celebrate the achievements of TV members of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. Essentially, it presents awards for the best television productions in Canada. Awards are currently presented in 87 categories. Prior to the creation of the Gemini Awards, the primary Canadian television award was the ACTRA Award.

The Gemini Awards also include several special awards given out for various reasons such as lifetime achievement.

Normally held in Toronto, the 2006 ceremony was held in Richmond, BC on 4 November 2006, the 2007 ceremony was held in Regina, Saskatchewan on 28 October 2007, and the 2009 ceremony was held in Calgary on 14 November 2009.

The award's French-language counterpart is the Prix Gémeaux.

Robert Carlyle, OBE (born 14 April 1961) is a Scottish actor. He is known for a variety of roles in films such as Trainspotting, The Full Monty, The World Is Not Enough, Angela's Ashes, The 51st State, and 28 Weeks Later. In addition to his film work, he is also known for his roles in the television shows Hamish Macbeth and Once Upon A Time.

Carlyle was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, the son of Elizabeth, a bus company employee, and Joseph Carlyle, a painter and decorator. He was brought up by his father after his mother left when Carlyle was four years old. He left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications and worked for his father as a painter and decorator; however, he continued his education by attending night classes at Cardonald College in Glasgow.

Carlyle became involved in drama at the Glasgow Arts Centre at the age of 21 (having been inspired by reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible), and subsequently graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 1991, he and four friends founded a theatre company, Raindog (which is now primarily involved in television and film work), and guest starred in The Bill. The same year he starred in his first movie, Riff-Raff, directed by Ken Loach.

Jason Edward Mewes (born June 12, 1974) is an American television and film actor, and internet radio show host best known for playing Jay, the vocal half of the duo Jay and Silent Bob, in longtime friend Kevin Smith's films.

Jason Mewes grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey. He never knew his father, and his mother was an ex-con and a drug addict. Relates Mewes: "She used to check into hotels and take TVs and sell them...I guess it really ain't funny, but it's weird because it was so fucked up...She used to steal mail. I used to drive around with her and she'd pull up and make me reach into mailboxes. It really wasn't pleasant." Although this exposure to drugs at first served to make him averse to them, he eventually began using them after graduating from high school.

His best friend was future filmmaker Kevin Smith, who describes his friend thus: "He's the kind of dude you know for five minutes and he whips his cock out. I was like, Somebody should put this dude in a movie. I just wanted to see if anybody outside our group of friends finds him as funny as I do."

Megan Elizabeth Follows (born March 14, 1968) is a Canadian/American actress. She is most known to international audiences for her role as Anne Shirley in the acclaimed 1985 Canadian television miniseries Anne of Green Gables and its two sequels.

Megan Follows was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada as the youngest of four children to an acting family. Her parents are noted Canadian theatre actor and director Ted Follows and his first wife, actress Dawn Greenhalgh. All of her siblings are also in the entertainment industry. Her older sister Edwina is a writer, while her brother Laurence and sister Samantha Follows (who is married to Sean O'Bryan) are actors.

Her first acting job came at the age of nine, when she landed a spot in a commercial for Bell Canada. She was directed to make an impudent gesture out of a school bus window - like sticking out her tongue - but ended up making a rather obscene and adult gesture instead. She quickly found steady work in Canada, appearing in a few TV series such as Matt and Jenny, The Mating Season, The Baxters and The Littlest Hobo, in which she guest-starred with her entire family in a two-part episode. She also starred in the short film "Boys and Girls" (1983), which won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.

Donald Brittain, OC (June 10, 1928 – July 21, 1989) was a film director and producer with the National Film Board of Canada.

Fields of Sacrifice (1964) is considered Brittain's first major film as director. His other notable directorial credits include the 1965 documentaries Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen and Memorandum and the Genie Award-winning 1979 documentary Paperland: The Bureaucrat Observed. He also directed the first-ever IMAX film, Tiger Child for Expo '70, and Earthwatch, a 70mm film for Expo 86.

He wrote the 1975 Oscar-nominated short documentary Whistling Smith. He co-directed the 1976 feature documentary Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry garnered 6 Canadian Film Awards and an Academy Award nomination.

Brittain also directed the three-part CBC-coproduced series The Champions, chronicling the lives and battles of Canadian political titans René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His most ambitious project was The King Chronicle, a three-part 1987-88 television series about the remarkable career of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.