Green Book is audience favourite at TIFF
TORONTO • It’s called the Grolsch People’s Choice Award, but its street name is the will-it-win-best-picture prize.
This year, audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival chose Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in the true story of a Brooklyn bouncer who became a chauffeur for a black musician travelling across the American South in the 1960s. The film opens in theatres Nov. 21. Green Book joins previous winners Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, La La Land, Room and The Imitation Game, all of which became best-picture nominees at the Oscars. The last People’s Choice to win best picture was Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, from 2013. Runners-up in the category were If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ followup to Moonlight; and Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA, which took the top prize at the recent Venice Film Festival.
The People’s Choice also awards prizes for documentaries and in the Midnight Madness program. Free Solo, about without-a-rope climber Alex Honnold, took the doc prize, with runners-up agridoc The Biggest Little Farm, and #TimesUp chronicle This Changes Everything.
In the Midnight Madness sidebar, Vasan Bala won for his film The Man Who Feels No Pain. The runners-up were Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation, and David Gordon Green’s Halloween. The Canada Goose Award for the best Canadian feature film, with a $30,000 prize, went to Sébastien Pilote and his film La disparition des lucioles (The Fireflies Are Gone), about an angst-ridden teenager in small-town Quebec who longs to leave but finds herself drawn to an older musician.
The City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian first feature film went to Katherine Jerkovic’s Les routes en février (Roads in February), about a young woman who travels from Montreal to Uruguay to visit her paternal grandmother after the death of her father.
The Toronto Platform Prize, worth $25,000, went to Ho Wi Ding for Cities of Last Things, a tale told in reverse chronological order about a man’s lifechanging decision. Special mention went to The River, from Kazakh director Emir Baigazin. FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics, gave its prizes to Carmel Winters’ Float Like a Butterfly, about a young woman in 1960s Ireland who dreams of being a boxer like her idol, Muhammad Ali; and to Skin, from Israeli director Guy Nattiv, about a former skinhead trying to put his violent past behind him.
The winner of the Audentia Award for best female filmmaker was Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian, Ethiopian director of Fig Tree, which tells of a Jewish Ethiopian teenager trying to save her Christian boyfriend from being drafted.