King's Speech persuades TIFF audience

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The King's Speech, an inspirational drama starring Colin Firth as England's stammering George VI, with Geoffrey Rush as the Australian speech therapist who helped the monarch find the words to lead England during the Second World War, won the Cadillac People's Choice Award as the most popular film at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, which closed Sunday.

With the Toronto audience win, the film jumps to the front runner slot in the Academy Awards race, with expected best picture and acting nominations for the two stars, Firth (nominated for last year's A Single Man) and Geoffrey Rush, who previously won a best actor Oscar for Shine. Director Tom Hooper, sent a message to the festival saying he was "beyond thrilled" with the prize, which capped the experience of the enthusiastically-received Toronto premiere at Roy Thomson Hall,

The runner-up prize went to another reality-based inspirational story, The First Grader, a Kenyan-set film about an 84-year-old man's fight to enroll in first grade to pursue a long-delayed education.

The 11-day festival marked the start of a new era for the festival with the opening of the TIFF Bell Lightbox on King Street, and a shift of operations from mid-town to the downtown entertainment district, ended on a strong note. At the awards lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel on Sunday, festival co-director Cameron Bailey said the festival had ended with the announcement of a number of film distribution deals which seemed to signal a comeback from the slump in the independent film sector over the past two years.

In other awards, The City of Toronto Award for best Canadian Feature Film went to Quebec director, Denis Villeneuve for Incendies, adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play, about a twin brother and sister who travel to the Middle East on a journey of discovery about their tortuous family history. Villeneuve said that he was grateful for the prize (including $30,000 cash) because Revenue Canada was demanding payments from 2009 and, with his award "I won't go to jail."

Director Deborah Chow, whose The High Cost of Living won the Skyy Vodka Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film. said the $15,000 cash $15,000 prize means she wouldn't have to return to her job at Starbucks next week. Chow's film stars Isabelle Blais as expectant mother, and former Scrubs star Zach Braff as a drug-addict. In another juried award, the $10,000 National Film Board-sponsored Canadian Short Film Award went to Vince Biron for Les fleurs de l'age, about school children on a summer's day.

Other audience awards included the Cadillac People's Choice Midnight Madness Award for Stake Land, a vampire flick about a teen and an older man making their way across a post-apocalyptic America. In accepting the award, writer-actor, Nick Damici, joked: "The film was about escaping to Canada - and now we have."

The runner-up was the Canadian mockumentary, Fubar II, about two metal-heads who take a job on the pipe lines in Fort McMurray.

The Cadillac People's Choice Documentary Award went to Sturla Gunarrson's Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, featuring the 75-year-old Canadian environmentalist. The Runner-up was Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light, about Chile's political history and its Atacama Desert.

A jury for the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) gave out two awards, to Pierre Thoretton's documentary L'amour fou, a portrait of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, in the festival's Special Presentations program. In the Discovery program, the jury gave the prize to Shawn Ku's drama Beautiful Boy, starring Michael Sheen and Mario Bello as grieving parents of a school killing. First time director, Shawn Ku, currently in Spain for the San Sebastian film festival, send a message expressing gratitude and surprise, because he had a "secret resignation that this small film would be lost" among so many choices at the festival.