Advertisement 1

Peter Farrelly’s Green Book takes home the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at TIFF

Green Book joins previous winners Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, La La Land, Room and The Imitation Game, all of which became best-picture nominees at the Oscars

Article content

It’s called the Grolsch People’s Choice Award, but its street name is the will-it-win-best-picture prize. This year, audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival chose Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in the true story of a Brooklyn bouncer who became a chauffeur for a black musician travelling across the American South in the 1960s. The film opens in theatres on Nov. 21.

Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content

Green Book joins previous winners Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, La La Land, Room and The Imitation Game, all of which became best-picture nominees at the Oscars. The last People’s Choice to win best picture was Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, from 2013.

Runners-up in the category were If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight; and Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA, which took the top prize at the recent Venice Film Festival.

Article content

The People’s Choice also awards prizes for documentaries and in the Midnight Madness program. Free Solo, about without-a-rope climber Alex Honnold, took the doc prize, with runners-up agri-doc The Biggest Little Farm, and #TimesUp chronicle This Changes Everything.

Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold, took the doc prize.
Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold, took the doc prize. Photo by TIFF/Movie still

In the Midnight Madness sidebar, Vasan Bala won for his film The Man Who Feels No Pain. The runners-up were Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation, and David Gordon Green’s Halloween.

The Canada Goose Award for the best Canadian feature film, with a $30,000 prize, went to Sébastien Pilote and his film La disparition des lucioles (The Fireflies Are Gone), about an angst-ridden teenager in small-town Quebec who longs to leave but finds herself drawn to an older musician.

Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content
Recommended from Editorial
  1. A scene from the film Jirga.
    On the journey to Jirga, from production to TIFF
  2. This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from First Man.
    As First Man touches down at TIFF, here are eight things you never knew about the moon landing
  3. As the Toronto International Film Festival prepares to kick off Thursday, it's doing so in a changed landscape -- one organizers have responded to with a few powerful additions to the usual mix of glitz and glam. With initiatives including the Share Her Journey women's rally, a newly created hotline and an emphasis on its code of conduct, TIFF is making it clear it's an inclusive and safe space after the tide of sexual misconduct allegations stemming from the Harvey Weinstein scandal last fall.
    Female panelists at TIFF women's rally tell crowd to 'use your voice' to stand up for movie gender inequality

The City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian first feature film went to Katherine Jerkovic’s Les routes en février (Road in February), about a young woman who travels from Montreal to Uruguay to visit her paternal grandmother after the death of her father.

Vasan Bala took home an award for his film The Man Who Feels No Pain.
Vasan Bala took home an award for his film The Man Who Feels No Pain. Photo by TIFF/Movie still

The Toronto Platform Prize, worth $25,000, went to Ho Wi Ding for Cities of Last Things, a tale told in reverse chronological order about a man’s life-changing decision. Special mention went to The River, from Kazakh director Emir Baigazin. The juried prize was decided on by filmmakers Béla Tarr, Margarethe von Trotta and Lee Chang-dong, whose own film Burning also played at the festival this year.

FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics, gave its prizes to Carmel Winters’ Float Like a Butterfly, about a young woman in 1960s Ireland who dreams of being a boxer like her idol, Mohammad Ali; and to Skin, from Israeli director Guy Nattiv, about a former skinhead trying to put his violent past behind him.

The winner of the Audentia Award for best female filmmaker was Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian, Ethiopian director of Fig Tree, which tells of a Jewish Ethiopian teenager trying to save her Christian boyfriend from being drafted.

cknight@nationalpost.com

twitter.com/chrisknightfilm

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

Latest from Shopping Essentials
  1. Advertisement 2
    Story continues below
This Week in Flyers