Vancouver: Mystic Ball, a sports doc by director Greg Hamilton, edged out the competition at the close of the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 13, winning the prize for most popular Canadian feature over heavy contenders Fido, by B.C.-based Andrew Currie, and Away from Her, Sarah Polley’s feature directorial debut.

VIFF audiences also came out in favor of the German political thriller Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), which took most popular international film.

‘If there was one surprise at this year’s festival, it was how consistently and overwhelmingly people adored this film,’ says organizer Alan Franey. The debut feature by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck raked in 500 votes, and swept the German Lola film awards earlier this year.

The VIFF jury, meanwhile, handed the Western Canada film award to director Paul Fox for Everything’s Gone Green, his Vancouver-centric comedy based on the Douglas Coupland screenplay.

Carl Bessai was the runner-up for his crime story Unnatural & Accidental, though Carmen Moore took home the artistic merit award for her role in the film.

Best documentary feature went to the U.S.-made Have You Heard from Johannesburg?, about the end of apartheid in South Africa, for ‘championing progressive social change through film,’ according to the jury.

Special mention went to Alberta’s Gary Burns and Jim Brown for Radiant City, a doc about suburbs.

The 16-day silver anniversary edition of VIFF drew some 150,000 fest-goers to 369 films from 50 countries. Its four-day Film & TV Forum also saw higher numbers, according to new program director Helen du Toit, though final numbers had yet to be confirmed.

The forum drew standing-room-only crowds to sessions including a doc master class with director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), a talk on TV directing with Alan Taylor (The Sopranos), and a development workshop with indie producers Susan Cartsonis (Mistress of Spices) and Paul Miller.

Newbie filmmakers also packed the house on Sept. 30, New Filmmakers’ Day, to hear Polley, Beau Bridges and Sook-Yin Lee explore the actor/director relationship.

Polley argued that as an actor, she felt ‘directors should know more about the craft of acting to relate more easily with the cast about their performances.’

Having recently directed her first feature, she said other first-timers should ‘be honest about your limitations… don’t fake it, everyone knows that you’re a first-timer.’

At a workshop on alternative distribution channels, Peter Broderick of Paradigm Consulting also delivered a strong message. ‘The old distribution model is broken,’ he said, and urged filmmakers to take control of the distribution of their films and retain as many rights as possible.

‘In the traditional distribution model the filmmaker takes all the risk, does all the work, then hands the film over to a distributor. If you’re lucky you’ll see 10% of the revenue,’ he said.

This year’s forum included new speed pitch sessions, at which emerging filmmakers got 10 minutes with execs from Infinity Pictures, Insight Film Studios, Omni Film Productions, Global TV, Brightlight Pictures and Crescent Entertainment.

‘This year we tried to create more opportunities for intense contact between filmmakers and decision makers, and we’ll definitely be doing more of that next year,’ says du Toit.

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