The Vancouver Asahi
A feature film based on the legendary Japanese-Canadian baseball team, The Vancouver Asahi, has won the top audience award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Ishii Yuya's film, which had its world premiere at VIFF, was named the winner of the Rogers People's Choice Award at the festival's closing gala Friday evening.
Other audience winners announced Friday include James Keach's Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me – which followed the legendary country singer as he goes on tour, despite his Alzheimer's disease diagnosis; it won the award for most popular international documentary. Jacob Tierney's Preggoland won the award for most popular Canadian feature film; and Suzanne Crocker's All the Time in the World, about a family that moves to the remote Yukon wilderness, was named most popular Canadian documentary.
Runners-up included Tony Girardin's Marinoni and Grant Baldwin's Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, which earlier in the festival won the juried VIFF Impact Award.
Ana Valine's Sitting on the Edge of Marlene, which earlier won the BC Emerging Filmmaking Award, was named the recipient of the Women in Film + Television Artistic Merit Award on Friday. The jury called it "a visual masterpiece dripping with Ana Valine's lyrical artistic voice from the very first frame."
Marsha Lederman