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The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, the largest public film festival in the world, came to a close on Saturday, after organizers handed out the Cadillac People's Choice Award to Slumdog Millionaire. This year's festival took place under the shadow of an American independent film industry that's on shaky ground. Slumdog Millionaire, with a Dickensian story set in contemporary India, nearly went direct to DVD after Warners Independent Pictures closed its doors earlier this year. (The film was picked up by competitor Fox Searchlight). That near-miss says a lot about the fragile economics of the kind of independent and art films for which festivals such as TIFF exist.

Both the independent/art house world and TIFF are in a state of transition. TIFF used the festival to promote its unfinished permanent home at the corner of King and John Streets, called the Bell Lightbox, a $196-million dollar building which was announced in 2003 but will apparently not be complete even by 2010. The Lightbox still needs to raise almost $50-million in a civic milieu that may be suffering from cultural fundraising fatigue.

Festival director Piers Handling, while not directly addressing the criticisms, said on Saturday that TIFF continued to enjoy positive feedback from both the public and the industry. Certainly the festival continues to be a big draw for the media - there are about 1,000 accredited press - and Hollywood stars - from Brad Pitt to Seth Rogen, Anne Hathaway to Dakota Fanning - though there may have been fewer future Oscar nominees screening this year.

Last year, four Oscar nominees - Juno, Atonement, No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - all were shown at TIFF. This year, the pickings appear slimmer: Slumdog Millionaire was a rarity, both a critical and popular favourite. Another admired film was Kathryn Bigelow's taut Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker, which follows a group of elite soldiers assigned to detonate bombs.

Hollywood studios also appeared to be holding back a number of high-profile films until November and December. These include Australia by director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!); The Road, based on another novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men); The Soloist, with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., directed by Joe Wright (Atonement); Gus Van Sant's Milk, starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the murdered San Francisco politician and gay hero; Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon, based on the hit play about the David Frost interviews with Richard Nixon; and director David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

In his introduction to the awards, Handling acknowledged that the studios may have been cautious this year: "People felt that some of the films that they took out last fall did not perform that well. I think there's a sense of slight gloom and depression in the industry, but I think on the whole they came out of Toronto feeling very positive."

Though the Toronto film festival can provide an Oscar bump, showing a movie at TIFF can also be risky. This year, a line of relatively high profile studio films received a mixed or negative reception. These included the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading and Spike Lee's lengthy Miracle at St. Anna.

Meanwhile, about a quarter of a million people in Toronto found time to sit in the dark and watch more than 300 films, in one case, with a particularly visceral reaction. One woman at the gory Midnight Madness screening of the French film, Martyrs, vomited. According to the festival's co-director Cameron Bailey, she reminded us that "a movie is never just a movie."

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The winners

City of Toronto CITY-TV Award for Best Canadian Feature

Lost Song, Rodrigue Jean's film about a woman suffering from post-partum depression

CITY-TV Best Canadian

First Feature

Marie-Hélène Cousineau

and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu's Before Tomorrow , about an elderly Inuit woman and her grandson as the last two survivors of their community. Best Canadian short film prize

Block B, named after an apartment building in Kuala Lumpur, directed by Chris Chong Chan Fui.

Diesel Discovery Award

Hunger, Steve McQueen (about Irish hunger striker, Bobby Sands).

International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI)

Derick Martini's Lymelife,a seventies coming-of-age story set on Long Island;

Steve Jacobs's Disgrace, adapted from J.M. Coetzee's Booker-prize winning novel.