Not that there’s much to predict or that it the Toronto Film Festival’s awards offer the same prestige as say, Cannes or Sundance, it’s audience prizes can often be a huge coup for a film and launch it into awards season (“Whale Rider,” “Hotel Rwanda,” “Tsotsi,” and though they need it a bit less, “American Beauty” and “Slumdog Millionaire”). Honestly, over the years the winners almost seem suspiciously perfect in how they find their way into awards season and give Toronto its reputation as awards season launch pad (and I just don’t get how a lone winner is even determined from 300 films voted on with a 1 through 5 ranking scale especially since some of those films don’t get their final screening until after the award has been announced).
But anyway, my conspiracy theory aside, the award matters. And I’ll be at the ceremony at 12:30 or so this afternoon and the winners should up at indieWIRE soon thereafter. Because I’m a nerd, here’s my predictions:
Cadillac People’s Choice Award: Up In The Air, directed by Jason Reitman
(alternate: City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan; or maybe even Precious, though I can’t recall a Sundance title ever winning here)
Cadillac People’s Choice Award For Best Documentary: The Topp Twins, directed by Leanne Pooley
(alternate: The Art of the Steal, directed by Don Argott)
Cadillac People’s Choice Award For Midnight Madness: Daybreakers, directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
(alternate: Solomon Kane, directed by Michael J. Bassett)
City of Toronto-CityTV Award For Best Canadian Feature Film: The Trotsky, directed by Jacob Tierney
(alternate: Suck, directed by Rob Stefaniuk)
CityTV Award For Best Canadian First Feature Film: I Killed My Mother, directed by Xavier Dolan
(alternate: Year of the Carnivore, directed by Sook-Yin Lee)
FIPRESCl Prize For Discovery Award: The Unloved, directed by Samantha Morton
(alternate: Applause, directed Martin Pieter Zandvliet)
FIPRESCl Prize For Special Presentations Award: City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan
(alternate: A Serious Man, directed Joel and Ethan Coen)
I figured I’d might as well put up a couple of these. As a supplement to this interview with “A Single Man” director Tom Ford, here’s some audio clips. After the jump.
I decided I needed to supplment this article on indieWIRE - which is basically ten quotes from my interview Werner Herzog - with some audio as Herzog’s delivery makes his glorious ramblings so much more. After the jump.
Xavier Dolan’s “I Killed My Mother” is most certainly one of my favourite films of the Toronto Film Festival. The film - written, directed, starring and produced by the 20-year old Dolan - the film details the intensely volatile relationship between a gay 16-year-old, Hubert (Dolan), and his mother, Chantale (the extraordinary Anne Dorval - who seriously gives one of the best performances of the year). The film builds through a series of richly hysterical conflicts that find these two characters exceedingly incapable of living with or without one another. Perhaps a viciously honest love story more than anything else, the film gives us an acute and compassionate portrayal of both sides of this complex human interaction.
It also works as an interesting companion piece to Tom Ford’s “A Single Man.” It totally normalizes Hubert’s sexuality, much like Ford normalizes George’s - and let’s it just background information for the film’s more dominant themes.
I interviewed both Ford and Dolan on the same day this week, which made for an interesting parallel in how they approached the topic in their films.
Dolan: “I feel like we’ve reached some point of evolution where we don’t need to claim things. I don’t take for granted that people accept homosexuality, but I didn’t feel the need to put that much importance on Hubert being gay… I think that movies that discuss gay identity are often too explicative or demand too much from society. I didn’t feel the need to put so much emphasis on it. This is not a movie about a ‘queer boy’ exploring his ‘queer life.’ It’s a movie about a son and his mother…For me personally, it wasn’t that hard. My life isn’t that complicated. I’m not from a Baptist church in Tennessee. When I told my mother and my father and the people close to me it never felt like it was going to break their heart or they were going to spray cold water on me. Since I didn’t live things that way, I didn’t feel the need to put that much importance on it in the film.”
Ford: “Isherwood’s books are not about struggling to deal with your homosexuality, which a lot of us do, of course. We live in a time when other people have struggled a great deal so we don’t have to struggle. Things are more accepted. You know, I’ve always thought of myself as just a human. I forget that I’m gay and I don’t see this as a gay story. It’s just a story about love and isolation and trying to figure out what life’s all about. What’s on screen, is the life I live. Those are my dogs. That’s the relationship I have with my boyfriend. The suicide was a suicide that happened in my family. At certain points in my life I’ve had intense depressions. That’s my life. It’s completely integrated.”
Here’s some poorly shot video from the Toronto premiere of the film - complete with some occasionally offensive moderation from a festival programmer (the way he talks to Dorval is demeaning, as is when he asks Dolan if he had practiced “method acting” in the sex scenes with his onscreen boyfriend).
Overall, though its a very entertaining Q&A. And please see this film whenever you get a chance:
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