Canadian Films Reaping Festival Awards and Oscar Nods Philippe Bosse/eOne Films Gabrielle Marion-Rivard and Vincent-Guillaume Otis in "Gabrielle." MONTREAL - As the executive director of Telefilm Canada, a government entity that finances some 60 movies a year, Carolle Brabant naturally goes to festivals all over the world to promote those films and advance what she calls "the branding of Canada" as a force in global cinema. Lately, she can't help noticing that she gets a much more respectful and enthusiastic reception than she used to. "My first year, people were polite," said Ms. Brabant, who assumed the direction of Telefilm, based here in the cultural and business capital of French-speaking Canada, in 2010. They were accepting the meetings. But this year, I was not able to take all the meetings that were requested. Three consecutive nominations for the Oscar for best foreign-language film will tend to do that. Since 2010, Denis Villeneuve's "Incendies," Philippe Falardeau's "Monsieur Lazhar" and Kim Nguyen's "War Witch" have all qualified for the Academy Award in that category. Canada is on a hot streak, its movies regularly winning prizes at festivals like Berlin and Tribeca. And with a strong slate of new releases having just been introduced at the Toronto International Film Festival, which began Sept. 5 and ends Sunday, this looks like another promising awards season. Certainly Hollywood has begun paying closer attention - and trying to tap into the growing talent pool here. Mr. Villeneuve's first American feature, "Prisoners," a drama with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal about two families that take the law into their own hands after their daughters are kidnapped, opens Friday, and Mr. Falardeau is wrapping up "The Good Lie," with Reese Witherspoon in the lead role and Ron Howard as a producer, for release in December. In addition, the Quebec-born director Ken Scott is doing an English-language remake of his 2011 comedy "Starbuck," a hit here in French, for Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks. That film, retitled "Delivery Man," is due in November and will star Vince Vaughn as a butcher-shop worker whose life is upended when he learns he is the father of 533 children as a result of a sperm bank donation he made in his youth. Canada's rising profile, however, is the product of a system deliberately structured to veer from the Hollywood model. In sharp contrast to the way of working in the United States, Canada has a filmmaking process that assigns a prominent role to national government agencies, which identify and nurture promising talent through official programs, vet film proposals, and help finance the making and distribution of those projects deemed to be the most interesting artistically. Canada and the United States "may seem to be similar, but when you look at the wiring of our cultural industry and how it has evolved, it's not at all alike," said Tom McSorley, a film scholar who is the executive director of the Canadian Film Institute. In terms of infrastructure and funding, it's closer to the European model, with both the state and the private sector involved. Even the metrics by which success is measured are different here. A strong performance at the box office is of course welcome, but directors whose films haven't done especially well commercially can still be assured of continued support, if their films distinguish themselves in some other fashion - like winning prizes at festivals. "We are an incubator of talent, financing basically niche films, independent films, and I felt we are not telling the whole story by just looking at the box office," Ms. Brabant said. I wanted to move away from that conception and evaluate films in a broader manner. The real opportunity is to expand the access of those films internationally, so we actually built an index to measure that," taking into account not only festival prizes, but also DVD sales and foreign distribution as criteria for decisions about financing. Telefilm's role as a financier of movies is complemented by the National Film Board of Canada, which is also based in Montreal and acts as a producer and distributor of films, primarily documentaries and animated movies. During the most recent fiscal year, Telefilm committed $95.8 million to the financing and promotion of Canadian films, with the Film Board spending another $40.4 million. Though French-speaking directors seem to be generating the most interest outside Canada at the moment, both government bodies support films in English as well as French. The board prides itself on having obtained more Oscar nominations than any entity outside Hollywood - 72 of its films have been nominated, and 12 have won - and it may have another contender this Oscar season in "Stories We Tell," a much-praised documentary written and directed by the actress Sarah Polley, whose 2007 feature film, "Away From Her," was nominated for two Oscars. That film was financed in part by Telefilm and four other national or provincial government bodies. Few figures, though, better exemplify the workings of the Canadian system than Mr. Villeneuve, a graduate of the University of Quebec film school here who has two movies in English coming out this fall. Besides "Prisoners," a big-budget Warner Brothers release, he has also completed "Enemy," a Canadian-Spanish adaptation of the novel "The Double," by José Saramago. It stars Mr. Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent and Isabella Rossellini and is a psychological thriller about a morose professor who spots his doppelgänger in a movie and resolves to track him down.