Acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal has scored another honour for her documentary Manufactured Landscapes, but this time, it was presented by the environmental movement's man of the hour.

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore presented the Toronto director with the Reel Current Award as part of an event at the Nashville Film Festival on Saturday.

The annual award honours a film that provides insight into a contemporary global issue.

Gore, who has been travelling the world to raise awareness of global warming and to promote his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, praised Baichwal's doc as "an extraordinarily haunting, beautiful, insightful, touching and thought-provoking movie."

Baichwal said afterward that it was "an incredible honour" and called Gore "an inspiration" for everyone.

"If there is a trend in Western civilization toward recognizing how important it is for us to be thinking about our impact on the planet, it is in very, very large part because of him," she said in a statement.

On the surface, Manufactured Landscapes is a portrait of celebrated Canadian Edward Burtynsky, as the photographer famed for his large-scale images of travels to China.

However, Baichwal's film pulls back into an examination of industrialization, globalization and the impact humans are leaving on the planet.

The film also won the Toronto-City Award for best Canadian feature at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, was selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the best documentary category at the Genie Awards in February.