Toronto — One of the most controversial movies ever presented in the 31-year history of the Toronto International Film Festival took one of its most prestigious awards Saturday as the festival finished showing the last of the 352 films it had programmed for its 2006 edition.
A total of seven prizes -- five with a cash value totalling $75,000, two with no cash value -- were handed out at a hotel luncheon Saturday afternoon to mark the completion of TIFF's 10-day run. Included among the winners was Bella, a small-budget first-time feature from Mexican-born director Alejandro Monteverde, that captured the always much-anticipated People's Choice Award.
However, Bella's surprise win, determined by a vote of regular filmgoers at TIFF, was overshadowed somewhat by the triumph of Death of a President. Directed by Britain's Gabriel Range, the 93-minute feature was awarded the 15th annual Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) by a five-member panel who lauded the film for "the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." In this instance, Range combines staged and archival footage to explore, in pseudo-documentary fashion, the fall-out from the imagined assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush in 2007.
The film came to TIFF as a world premiere, but had no distribution deal for Canada, the U.S. or Europe (it's to be shown on British TV next month) and was known only by a coy acronym, D.O.A.P., until just before the festival's Sept. 7 start. Thanks to TIFF, Range is heading home with important distribution deals for the North American market, a likely wide release in November and, of course, great dollops of media attention, pro and con.
A scene from Gabriel Range's 'Death of a President'. (AP)
While TIFF co-director Noah Cowan hailed the film as "breathtakingly original," some critics have labelled it "irresponsible" and "sensationalistic." A White House spokesperson told a Canadian broadcaster earlier this week that he wouldn't "dignify the film with a response."
FIPRESCI general secretary Klaus Eder of Munich said it took only two hours of deliberation for his panel to decide to honour Range for a movie that, he said, "irritated us a lot." It's "not the political message. Everyone can have a political message. No, it's because of the way it questions our conventions of making and seeing films."
The critics' prize, given to "an emerging filmmaker" for a movie having its world premiere in Toronto, has no cash value, but its clout and prestige value are enormous. Speaking after getting the prize, director Range characterized initial hostility towards D.O.A.P. as "a knee-jerk reaction" from "people who've not even seen the film." Once they do, he said, they'll find it's "sensitive" and "balanced" and "an engaging and compelling portrait of the post 9/11 world we live in."
Bella's People's Choice victory over Barbara Kopple's documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing and Patrice Leconte's Mon meilleur ami, about a wealthy man's search for true friendship, should put Monteverde's tale of a day in the life of two New Yorkers on Oscar's radar. Last year's People's Choice topper, South Africa's Tsotsi, won the best foreign film Academy Award in February while the 2004 winner, Hotel Rwanda, earned three Oscar nominations. Other past recipients that have earned Oscar consideration include Chariots of Fire, The Big Chill, American Beauty, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Life is Beautiful and Amelie.
A five-member jury unanimously awarded Noel Mitrani's Sur la trace d'Igor Rizzi (On the Trail of Igor Rizzi) the $15,000 Citytv prize for best Canadian first feature film. The same jury gave Toronto documentarian Jennifer Baichwal a $30,000 cheque and a trophy for best Canadian feature for Manufactured Landscapes, her exploration of a recent trip to China by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The award is co-sponsored by the City of Toronto and Citytv.
Reg Harkema's Monkey Warfare, starring Don McKellar, was named runner-up. Said Harkema, a B.C. native, afterwards: "Gee, I guess I'm not gonna buy that huge hunk of hash [hashish] I was dreaming about" -- an echo of director Bruce McDonald's statement that "$25,000 is going to buy me a chunk of hash" when his feature Roadkill took the City-Toronto prize in 1989.
Another Canadian prize, the $10,000 Short Cuts Canada Award for best short, went to Montrealer Maxime Giroux's 23-minute Les Jours.
The $10,000 Diesel Discovery Prize, voted on by the festival media corps and given to a first-time or developing director, was awarded to Oslo's Joachim Trier for his feature Reprise. A new honour, the $10,000 Swarovski Cultural Innovation Award, was given by a three-member jury to Istanbul-born director Ozer Kiziltan for his debut feature, Takva -- A Man's Fear of God. Thirteen films, including Death of a President, were in the running for the Swarovski, which salutes filmmakers "who challenge our notions of mainstream cinema."
Hundreds of film celebrites from around the world, including Penelope Cruz, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Sir Ridley Scott, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Lopez, attended this year's TIFF, confirming the festival's importance as a cultural player equal to France's famous Cannes and Robert Redford's Sundance festival in Utah.
