TIFF50 Awards

On Sunday, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey announced that attendees of the festival’s fiftieth-anniversary edition had voted to give the prize that awards season prognosticators have learned to keep a close eye on—as Kate Erbland notes at IndieWire, twelve of the last fifteen winners of the People’s Choice Award have gone on to become nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture—to Zhao’s Hamnet. In the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jesse Buckley), process their grief over the loss of their eleven-year-old son in what seem at first to be irreconcilably different ways.

“Parts of the movie are a hard watch, as near to the bone of human experience as it gets,” writes Ty Burr, “but the final sequence, the premiere performance of Will’s Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, covers an immense emotional range and speaks to art as one of the only ways—and maybe the holiest one—to make sense of an insensible existence . . . There’s a hush at the center of this movie that’s as profound as any I’ve experienced in the dark of a screening.”

The first and second runners-up are Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which Rolling Stone’s David Fear calls “a vital addition to the canon of creature features based around [Mary] Shelley’s macabre magnum opus,” and Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery from Rian Johnson. “If Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be, it was at the very least a deserved victory lap,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee. Wake Up Dead Man is “a rip-roaring return to form that shows the series to be confidently back on track.”

Toronto launched a new prize this year, the International People’s Choice Award, and it’s as if the winner had already staked its claim with its title: No Other Choice. In his acceptance speech, Park Chan-wook even noted that, having seen audiences’ reactions at the festival, he wasn’t particularly surprised to have won. Lee Byung-hun stars as a man so desperate to land a job that he kills off his most likely competitors. For Davide Abbatescianni at Cineuropa, No Other Choice is “a gruesome yet frequently hilarious thriller-comedy that interrogates capitalism, status, corporate culture, and the merciless logic of the market economy, while offering another showcase for the Korean helmer’s razor-sharp command of tone and style.”

The first runner-up for the new award is Joachim Trier’s family drama Sentimental Value, starring Stellan Skarsgård as a once-renowned filmmaker and Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as his daughters. “Accessible and brilliantly acted,” wrote David Schwartz in a dispatch from Cannes to Screen Slate, “this is exactly the kind of movie that James Brooks turned out so reliably throughout the ’80s and ’90s.”

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is the second runner-up. “A drama in which aspirations collide with harsh political realities, its tale of impoverished young men trying to escape their circumstances proves to be both a moving character piece as well as a searing indictment of modern India,” writes Siddhant Adlakha for Variety.

The People’s Choice Documentary Award went to a film TIFF invited, then disinvited, and then invited again. In The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, director Barry Avrich tracks the fifty-mile journey of a retired Israeli general from Tel Aviv to the Nahal Oz kibbutz to save his family during the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. “I’d posit that there are disingenuous filmmaking choices,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg, “but those are the choices he made, which one set of viewers will find inspiring and another will find offensive. This isn’t the film that was going to bridge those gaps anyway.”

The first runner-up is Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, which for Variety’s Owen Gleiberman is “a revelation, because for ninety-six minutes it shows you just how intoxicating Elvis Presley was when he began to perform live in Las Vegas in 1969 and the early ’70s.” Gleiberman also clearly enjoyed the second runner-up, Nick Davis’s “sharp and effusive” You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). It’s the story of a 1972 production of the hippy-dippy Jesus musical starring future SNL and SCTV regulars such as Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Eugene Levy.

No one was surprised to see Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie win the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award. It played like gangbusters when it premiered at SXSW, and the hometown audience was evidently even more boisterously appreciative. For two decades—first in a web series, then on a sitcom, and now, the Movie—Johnson and Jay McCarrol have been playing Matt and Jay, two guys who stage stunts in the hopes of landing a gig at the Rivoli, a Toronto club that seats just over two hundred. “Think Borat meets Flight of the Conchords and you won’t be far wrong,” writes Slate’s Sam Adams, “but there is something particularly, well, Canadian about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the modesty of Matt and Jay’s dreams.”

Curry Barker’s Obsession is the first runner-up, and for ScreenAnarchy’s Kurt Halfyard, it’s “as much a horror-comedy as it is a stress-induced anxiety attack.” And the second runner-up is Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, “a truly bonkers showcase of incredible stunt and fight choreography that drew comparisons to The Raid and Night Comes for Us,” according to RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico.

TIFF’s one true competitive program, Platform, aims to champion “bold directorial vision and distinctive storytelling.” This year’s winner is To the Victory!, the fifth feature from Valentyn Vasyanovych (Atlantis). “The central premise of the film, photographed in Vasyanovych’s usual static long takes, is that of the process of returning,” writes Tomas Trussow. “What can be ‘returned’ in a future postwar Ukraine? For Vasyanovych, it is a dual concern: Can he return to being the filmmaker he was before the war began? And can there be a Ukraine if those who fled the war refuse to return to their homeland after it ends?”

The Platform jury—Carlos Marqués-Marcet (chair), Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Chloé Robichaud—nodded to György Pálfi’s Hen with an honorable mention. Talking with Pálfi for Variety, Rafa Sales Ross notes that the film “sees the Hungarian director enlist a stellar cast of eight real-life chickens all taking turns as the titular character to build a moving, melancholic musing on life in a seaside village against the backdrop of Greece’s migrant crisis.”

Nearly three hundred films screened during the festival, and throughout TIFF50, eighteen very fine critics posted ratings of a good number of them to the grid at Moirée. In the overall ranking, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron has come out on top, and on Sunday, Romvari won the Best Canadian Discovery Award as well.

“Many of Romvari’s celebrated short films have lived in the overlap between fiction and nonfiction,” writes Jessica Kiang for Film Comment, “but that instinct is taken to a piercingly perceptive new level in her feature debut. Initially, its evocative soundscape of spritzing garden hoses and zoinging trampoline springs, plus the glancing, sunflared cinematography, makes the film play as a reminiscence of a pivotal summer holiday, albeit one unusually sensitive to the inaccuracies of our childhood perceptions. But, as if the writer-director is becoming impatient with the way her eight-year-old on-screen avatar, Sasha (Eylul Guven), inevitably turns her gaze away from things the adult Romvari is desperate to look at, soon the film’s reality starts to warp.”

Wrong Husband, the latest feature from Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner), won the Best Canadian Feature Film Award. The jury praises the film as “a love story from thousands of years ago that blends the epic and intimate and immerses viewers in a mesmerizing and unique cinematic experience.”

Each year, the International Federation of Film Critics selects a debut feature premiering in either the Centerpiece or Discovery programs as the winner of its FIPRESCI Prize. In Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’s Forastera, a family is summering in Mallorca when their matriarch takes a fall and dies. Sixteen-year-old Cata (Zoe Stein) begins to take on her grandmother’s persona. For Michael Sicinski at In Review Online, Forastera is “a deftly observed story about the different forms that grief can take, and how in moments of tragedy, some of the oldest and most pernicious patterns of family behavior suddenly assert themselves, undoing years of healing and sending us back to factory specs.”