The Art of Adventure topped the winners at this year’s Available Light Film Festival (ALFF). The documentary by Alison Reid won the ALFF Audience Choice Award for Best Canadian Documentary. The Art of Adventure also scored the overall number one spot in the audience award rankings for the Whitehorse festival, which drew over 7100 attendees across the 10-day event.
Reid’s film chronicles the enduring friendship of artist Robert Bateman and biologist Bristol Foster as they revisit their 1957 globe-trotting adventure in their Land Rover The Grizzly Torque. The Art of Adventure sees the friends search for their trusty vehicle, while reflecting upon the ways in which their passion and activism continues to this day. The film won the overall audience vote out of 50 films in contention.
On the international front, Champions of the Golden Valley, directed by Ben Sturgulewski, won the Audience Award for Best International Feature. The US doc chronicles the rise in downhill ski culture in Afghanistan. And among the dramas, Tasha Hubbard’s Meadowlarks, based on her 2017 doc Birth of a Family, won the Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature – Fiction. The film observes a quartet of siblings connecting for the first time after the Sixties Scoop tore their family apart.
Among the juried Made in the North Awards celebrating Canadian film, Zacharias Kunuk’s Wrong Husband was named Best Canadian Feature Film. The prize carries a purse of $2000, courtesy of Kobayashi + Zedda Architects. Patrick Shannon’s basketball doc Saints and Warriors received a special mention. Gavin Baird’s Klee won Best Canadian Short, earning $1000 courtesy of the Canada Media Fund, while Gods & Devils by Jay Cardinal Villeneuve received a special mention. And for Best Northern Short, Douglas Joe’s Fast and the RCrious won a prize of $1000, sponsored by the Yukon Film Society with Robert Joe’s Shades of Darkness receiving an honourable mention.
Joe’s forthcoming project The Vortex won the Northwestel Fiction Prize competition, earning him $7,500 in cash and $5,000 in in-kind support from Northwestel Community TV, Screen Production Yukon Association and the Yukon Film Society. Meanwhile, Mira Siriois’s project Banana Junction won the Tracey Freisen Documentary Prize which includes $1000 in cash provided Canadian Media Producers Association BC and $2500 in-kind support from Yukon Film Society. The prize is named in honour of the late stalwart of Canadian film.
The top 20 films in the ALFF Audience Award rankings are as follows:
- The Art of Adventure
- Beyond the Left Hand Path
- Nechako: It Will Be A Big River Again
- Champions of the Golden Valley
- Mr. Nobody Against Putin
- Saints and Warriors
- Meadowlarks
- King Arthur’s Knight
- Köln 75
- Modern Whore
- Palestine 36
- The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes
- The Track
- Late Shift
- Agatha’s Almanac
- Dancing on the Elephant
- Sentimental Value
- Mammoth Hunters
- Folktales
- Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
