"American Fiction" is the People's Choice Winner at TIFF. That's usually an Oscar omen.

by Nathaniel R

American Fiction (coming from MGM)

Oscar-campaigning will probably look a lot different this season as Ben recently noted. With the strike ongoing and no resolution in sight there will be a glamour vacuum. Nature abhors a vaccuum so maybe the prestige of prizes from the Big Five festivals will gain yet more importance? Chronologically that's Sundance (A Thousand and One), Berlinale (On the Adamant -- a French documentary), Cannes (Anatomy of a Fall - France's Oscar submission finalist), and Venice (Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things), with Toronto as the capper.  TIFF '23 ends today (though if we know ever-prolific Cláudio, there's a few more posts coming). Toronto is not juried in the traditional way that it's predecessors on the calendar are so the People's Choice Winner is the big prize.

American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, took that coveted honor for 2023. It will be released by MGM on November 3rd. The satire is about an author who writes an awful book in protest of the industries treatment of black authors that becomes a best-seller (to his horror). The majority of winners of this prize go on to Best Picture nominations. The full list of prizes is after the jump...

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TIFF '23: "The New Boy" and "Kidnapped"

by Cláudio Alves 

A boy contemplates Jesus on the cross, the figure's perpetual suffering a striking sight. Because he's not been raised Christian, the youth relates more to the depicted pain than the iconography's meaning. In a show of naïve empathy that others would read as sacrilegious, he frees Christ, ripping the nails out of the cross. Whether the son of god's body tumbles a wooden fall or walks away reborn depends on the film, but the basic premise of these scenes ties Warwick Thornton's The New Boy and Marco Bellocchio's Kidnapped together. 

Both films consider historical atrocities done in the name of good, unmoored children at the center of a religious storm. Thornton sees a fictional aboriginal boy as a synecdoche for his colonized people, while the Italian master dramatizes the real-life episode of a Jewish boy taken from his family…

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TIFF '23: Zar Amir Ebrahimi mesmerizes as "Shayda"

by Cláudio Alves

"Shayda" is coming to US theaters on December 1st from Sony Pictures Classics.

Though I've hardly been running after Oscar contenders while at TIFF – apologies if that's what you wanted out of this coverage – the Best International Film race remains at the forefront of my mind. With new daily announcements, the festival's an excellent opportunity to catch some titles that could be hard to track down later in the season. So, a lot of my scheduling has been built around productions that might end up in that race or have already been confirmed for the 96th Academy Awards. Not all of the experiences are positive, but  a few of them are revelatory.

Such is the case of Noora Niasari's feature debut, Shayda, representing Australia. If you thought Zar Amir Ebrahimi was remarkable in last year's Holy Spider, wait to see what she does here…

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TIFF '23: At the Crossroads of Old and New

by Cláudio Alves

During my days at the festival, I've found TIFF can be a place of great discovery, full of small titles coexisting with big ones, often besting them from a disadvantageous position. Discovery can also exist in the dialogues established between programmed projects, threads of shared ideas and ideals linking works of distinct artists from all over the globe.

Because of its status as Bhutan's Oscar submission and Pawo Choyning Dorji's follow-up to his nominated Lunana, I would always see The Monk and the Gun. However, the conversations it shares with other, less high profile films, were a welcome surprise. Despite their disparate genres (comedy, character study, tragedy) themes of encroaching modernity within traditional communities of mountainous Asian nations echoed back from the Nepalese A Road to a Village and the Mongolian City of Wind...

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TIFF: Viggo Mortensen’s ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’

By Abe Friedtanzer 

Courtesy of TIFF

Western films tend to deal with violence in some capacity, presenting a world either defined by lawlessness or exploring what it means to set up a system of law and order to ensure that it isn't. When everyone has a gun and collecting bounties is a popular pastime, it can be difficult to instill a sense of moral consequences in a society that may not be interested in it. The Dead Don’t Hurt weaves a love story into a portrait of a town on the edge of becoming modern. A bleak view of humanity emerges... 

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