Vancouver: Attendance was up 2% at the 18th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, which wrapped two weeks of screenings Oct. 10. Ticket sales numbered 135,000 and overall revenues jumped 4% to $775,000.

The growth was achieved despite the loss of 9,500 seats since last year’s festival. The Caprice Downtown Theatre on Granville Row has closed, but, the festival added two smaller theatres – Vancouver East Cinema and the Blinding Light Cinema – but still fell short in total number of seats available compared with last year.

rollercoaster, a debut film by Vancouver’s Scott Smith, won the Federal Express Award as the most popular Canadian film at the festival. The film is about a group of teenagers who take over an amusement park to fulfill a suicide pact. The Divine Ryans (Halifax’s imX communications) – the story of a young boy’s efforts to slough off his family’s history – was the runner-up vote-getter.

Ghengis Blues, meanwhile, won the Air Canada Award for most popular film overall and the Chief Dan George Humanitarian Award. Written and directed by Roko Belic, the film is about the power of music to unite people across cultural and geographical boundaries.

The Telefilm Canada awards for best emerging Western Canadian directors went to Manitoba-based Terrance Odette in the feature-length category for Heater, about two homeless men in Winnipeg, and b.c.-based Michelle Ryan and Jessica Salo for their short film Pride, a story of perseverance in the face of racism and stereotyping.

Odette’s Heater also won the Rogers Award for best Western Canadian screenplay.

Women in Film and Video Vancouver awarded actor Enuka Okuma its annual Artistic Merit Award. Okuma, a featured performer in the one-time teen series Madison, stars as a seemingly uncaring angel in Ryan Bondar’s debut feature DayDrift, which screened at this year’s viff.

Austrian documentary Megacities, an essay about the world’s metropolises by Michael Glowegger, won the National Film Board of Canada Award for best documentary feature. Village of Idiots, by filmmakers Rose Newlove and Eugene Fedorenko and written by Vancouver’s John Lazarus, won the nfb’s animation prize.

Attendance and revenues were also up at the 14th annual Trade Forum, the business focus of viff.

According to Trade Forum producer Melanie Friesen, attendance was up 15% and corporate sponsorship was up 18% compared to tallies in 1998.

Friesen credits this year’s lineup of guests for the growth. Panel sessions included directors Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary), Bruce Beresford (Double Jeopardy), Doug Limon (Go), Alexander Payne (Election) and Jeremy Podeswa (The Five Senses). Other guests included producers Michael Monello (The Blair Witch Project) and Niv Fichman (The Red Violin).

The Trade Forum ran Sept. 29 to Oct. 1.

New Filmmakers’ Day, the traditional close of the Trade Forum, also drew record attendance, sparked by the session Making Features Digitally.