Last night's Movie Awards ceremony at the International Freeskiing Film Festival in Montreal was an unusual spectacle - to say the least.

The Cinema Imperial in downtown Montreal, about to get an overdose of ski films in the next few days.

Last night’s iF3 Movie Awards kicked off the start of this year’s International Freeskiing Film Festival in Montreal with some new faces taking the stage—or not, because they weren’t there—for some of the night’s biggest awards.

European crew Legs Of Steel rounded up a respectable collection of iF3 award skis – enough to mount up a pair and still have one left over. Their film “Passenger” got the pick for Best Editing as well as Best Single Shot for another classic Legs Of Steel skier train at their Stubai park shoot, and LOS rider Tom Leitner won the dubious distinction of Best Crash for a brutal big-mountain tumble. It’s yet to be determined which of his friends at iF3 will be lugging home the heavy concrete Best Crash award for Tom.

The Legs of Steel crew might have to pay some extra baggage fees to get all this hardware back to Europe.

Super Proof, the up-and-coming production company headed by Sean Pettit, also made off with a haul of accolades for their film “The Masquerade,” picking up awards for Best Cinematography, Best Big Mountain Film, and Best Male Freeride Performance for Pettit.

But the night’s big winner was JF Houle, who was called to the stage no less than three times for his two-year personal project “Houligan,” but blew it by being at home exporting a final copy of his film, rather than in the Cinema Imperial accepting all the awards for it.

Tatum Monod was on hand to accept the Best Female Short award for her segment in Level 1’s “Small World.”

To be fair to JF, he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t on-hand to accept his awards. A surprising (some might say disappointing) number of awards were given to absentee winners, which put a damper on the energy of the evening. But the iF3 crew did a great job of assembling video acceptance speeches from the absent parties, many of which turned out to be highly entertaining in their own right. I’d have to give the award for “Best Video Acceptance Speech” to Jacob Hyllengren Larsson, who plopped down on his couch, cracked a beer and said, “Tomorrow I’ll go back to work on the forklift and feel just a little bit better about myself.”

MCs Reed Speedman and Doug Bishop wisecracked their way through a long and sometimes tedious ceremony, with a total 22 awards given out and seemingly half of the awardees not in attendance.

It’s a strange choice for iF3 to hold its awards ceremony on the first night of the festival. Not everyone has arrived yet, so the Cinema Imperial is only half full, and it’s not easy for the crowd to muster enthusiasm for films that they haven’t even seen yet. But if the turn-up did not occur during the awards ceremony, it certainly did during the afterparty. At iF3, that’s one thing you can count on.

Read the full list of 2015 iF3 award winners here, and check back for more coverage from Montreal.