Yangtze, Hiroshima docs win Banff World TV Awards

(CBC) - Montreal filmmaker Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze was named best Canadian program at the Banff World Television Awards Monday evening.

The grand prize for international TV at the prestigious annual Banff Festival went to an HBO documentary made with Farallon Films, White Light/Black Rain: The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

U.S. filmmaker Steven Okazaki, who won an Oscar for his 1990 documentary short Days of Waiting, revisited the Japanese cities and shared the stories of some of the only people to have survived a nuclear attack in White Light/Black Rain.

Up the Yantze, also called Ghosts of the Yangtze, was a feature-length documentary made by EyeSteel Films with the National Film Board, CBC Newsworld and Radio Canada.

It follows two very different young people - one from a poor family, one from a well-off family - who go to work on a cruise ship as the Three Gorges Dam floods the towns and villages where their families live. The film paints a portrait of a changing China.

Also honoured was The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic, a Canadian program that aired on Discovery Channel. It tells the stories of real people with inexplicable superhuman powers.

Producers and TV stations from around the world enter the Banff World Television Awards, with the bulk of the winners coming from the U.S. or the U.K.

Best continuing series was U.K. production Skins, best comedy was BBC/HBO's Extras and best reality TV program was Intervention, screened on A&E in the U.S.

An Israeli current affairs show, Jerusalem is Proud to Present, won the award for social and humanitarian programs, and a German-U.S. documentary, 51st Birch St., won a special jury prize.

Other winners from Canada:

- How the Gimquat Found her Song, best children's program, by Trace Pictures and Oz Media.

- Odd Job Jack, best interactive program, by Smiley Guy Studios.

- NFB filmmaker in residence, best internet only programs.

- The Border, best mobile programs and enhancements, by CBC.

- Four Wings and a Prayer, best wildlife program, by NFB, NHK and Primitive Entertainment.

Canadian actress Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha on Sex and the City, was honoured with the NBC Universal Canada Award of Distinction.

BBC producer Jon Plowman, who was behind such programs as the British version of The Office, The Vicar of Dibley and French and Saunders, was given an award for lifetime achievement.

The Banff Television Festival, one of the most important international events in television production, continues all week in Banff, Alta.