In the end, the watchword for the 2011 Toronto Film Festival was “unpredictable”. The festival’s first full year at the TIFF Bell Lightbox was marked by surprises both good and bad – and sometimes the two were inextricably linked.
The design of the Lightbox proved a little too inflexible to handle the demands of the press corps and the public festival, with long lines for screenings snaggling into one another (or broken into segments across various floors) while photographers and reporters spent an hour waiting for one of the two elevators to take them to the secured press conferences on the sixth floor – a level not reachable by escalators or stairs. (In fairness, this was only an issue for the public festival when the spillover from the elevator waiting area threatened to block access to the escalators to the theatres.)
Projector problems seemed more prevalent than last year, though the festival proved as resourceful at handling them as ever when the Midnight Madness screening of Smuggler hit a snag, programmer Colin Geddes pulled stand-up comic and filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait out of the audience for a 30-minute set on the stage of the Ryerson Theatre. Goldthwait was at the festival with his own Midnight Madness entry, God Bless America – it’s nice when things work out that way.
At Sunday’s concluding awards brunch at the Four Seasons – one of the rare TIFF events to take place in the festival’s old Yorkville stomping grounds – the assembled media and filmmakers were caught out by the announcement of Caramel director Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? as the winner of this year’s Cadillac People’s Choice Award. Buzz about Labaki’s film had been minimal, and expected candidates like The Artist, The Descendants and Goon didn’t even make the list of runners-up.
(The first runner-up for the prize, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, pulled strong reviews but modest public conversation, while the second, Ken Scott’s Starbuck, was largely dismissed by critics and generated very little buzz beyond the Quebec media.)
The specialty People’s Choice Awards, for documentaries and films in the Midnight Madness program, went to Jon Shenk’s The Island President and Gareth Evans’s The Raid, respectively.
Other prizes sparked their own little waves of surprise. The SKYY Vodka award for Best Canadian First Feature, with its cash prize of $15,000, was awarded to Nathan Morlando’s Edwin Boyd the City Of Toronto award for Best Canadian Feature, worth $30,000, to Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar. Ian Harnarine’s Trinidad-shot Doubles With Slight Pepper was named Best Canadian Short.
The FIPRESCI jury, composed of critics from around the world, awarded its Discovery prize to Axel Petersén’s Avalon, while its Special Presentations prize went to Gianni Amelio’s The First Man, adapted from an unfinished novel by Albert Camus.
