A Bracebridge journalist has won a Canadian Screen Award.
Zander Sherman and his two research colleagues won the Barbara Sears Award for Best Editorial Research Tuesday night in Toronto for their work on the documentary Murder in Cottage Country.
Timothy Sawa and Lisa Mayor were co-nominated for the work they did with Sherman on the mysterious disappearance of four senior citizens who went missing in Muskoka in the 1990s while in the care of an old age facility. The documentary was a co-production between the Fifth Estate and The Walrus magazine.
Sherman says jokingly the whole reason he got into writing was to avoid exactly the situation he was in after he heard his name read.
“Just right before the award was announced I turned to my girlfriend and I said ‘You know I have a terrible feeling I’m going to win,’” he recalls. “Because I knew that if I did I have to go on stage I sometimes joke that I got into writing in order to avoid speaking in public.”
He says getting recognized in front of his peers has helped with inquiries for other mysteries to investigate.
“It’s funny how it happens but I have been pitched a lot of new stories in the past couple of days,” says Sherman.
He is currently producing a podcast for CBC about the missing Muskoka seniors that will drop in June. But he is keeping an eye out for his next project.
“I’m drawn to mysteries,” he admits. “And just things that I find fascinating and my criteria for picking a story to follow is will the duration of my fascination with it continue throughout the time it is going to take to research. This Muskoka story took four years that period of time did sustain my interest. “
He has also been approached by some producers to for work on a documentary that might appear on Netflix, a platform where that genre does well.