The first edition of the Canadian Film Awards took place in 1949 at the Little Elgin Theatre in Ottawa. They were very different from the current rendition of the Canadian Screen Awards, as they limited to films and the main award was for a short film.
At the beginning they were organized by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, but with the creation of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television in 1979, they changed the rules and were renamed as Genie Awards.
They announced the acting awards would be gender neutral in 2023, adopting the system used by the Berlin Film Festival first, and other festivals subsequently, as San Sebastián FIlm Festival.
The film Brother won a record number of 12 awards in the category of fiction film in this edition.
Here are the main phases of the evolution of the awards during the years: