Chloé Leriche’s Atikamekw Suns led the winners at the Whistler Film Festival (WFF), picking up four awards, including the Borsos Award for Best Canadian Feature Film.

The winners of the five juried film competitions were announced on Monday (Dec. 4), along with the Power Pitch and MPPIA Short Film Awards.

Other honours for Atikamekw Suns (Les Films de l’autre) include Best Director of a Borsos Competition Film for Leriche, and Best Performance in a Borsos Competition Film Award for its ensemble cast. The Best Canadian Feature award comes with a $35,000 prize, with $15,000 cash presented by the Directors Guild of Canada B.C. District Council and a $20,000 post-production prize presented by Company 3.

The film also won the EDA Award for Best Female Directed Feature, presented by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

The jury for Best Canadian Feature included Alexandria Raffe, Patricia Rozema and Grace Dove.

In presenting the awards to Atikamekw Suns, the jury lauded Leriche’s direction, and noted that the film’s cast “stood out as delivering an exceptional performance and the dignity they brought to the characters, especially considering how personal this story is for many of them.”

The drama, based on a true story, looks at the suspicious deaths of five young people from the Atikamekw First Nation community of Matawan in 1977 and the indifference of the authorities investigating the case.

Sean Garrity’s romantic drama The Burning Season won Best Screenplay in a Borsos Film for Diana Frances and star Jonas Chernick. Chernick also produced under his banner Banana-Moon Sky Films, along with Andrew Bronfman.

Also winning in the Borso Film competition was Monia Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain (Metafilms), which picked up best cinematography for André Turpin, and Rebecca Snow’s Canada-U.S. copro The Boy in the Woods (Lumanity Productions, JoBro Productions), which won best editing for Robert Swartz.

In other categories, Kim Albright won the Best B.C. Director Award for With Love and a Major Organ (Violator Films); Altona (Foreshadow Films, Langer Films) by the Affolter brothers won the World Documentary Award; and A Whole Life by Hans Steinbichler won Best Mountain Culture Feature Film.

The festival also handed out prizes to this year’s winners of the Power Pitch and MPPIA Short Film Award competitions.

B.C.-based producer Oscar Wolfgang won the Power Pitch competition on Dec. 1 for his project Ginger. Wolfgang picks up a $36,000 prize package, including a $25,000 production package featuring a post-production credit from Company 3 Method Ltd., plus a $10,000 lighting and grip production credit and $1,000 cash prize from William F. White International.

Set in 1910 on Vancouver Island, Ginger follows the story of an English immigrant who witnesses the abuse and death of workers in a mine. But his efforts to secure worker rights prompt a deadly manhunt by the Canadian government, read a description of the film.

This year’s Power Pitch jury included Kristen Figeroid, president of international sales and distribution at Neon, Sharon Stevens, VP of programming at Hollywood Suite and Paul Gratton, director of programming at WFF.

Stevens said “while every project was unique and a strong contender for the prize, Ginger conveyed a universal appeal that we believed would succeed in Canada and beyond.”

Sasha Duncan, meanwhile, won the MPPIA Short Film Award for her short, easybake. MPPIA Short Film Award provides an emerging B.C. filmmaker with a $15,000 cash award plus in-kind production services of up to $100,000 for a short film project.

The full list of winners is available on the WFF site.

Photo courtesy of Whistler Film Festival