Black Hollywood Education & Resource Center » “The American Novel” directed by Cord Jefferson wins the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival
American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival
Written by Brent Lange
“American fantasydirector Cord Jefferson’s biting satire about race and the media, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, boosting its chances at the Oscars.
The People’s Choice Awards at TIFF are among the best predictors of eventual awards success, though the 2023 festival hosted a weaker lineup than most years due to writers and actors strikes that saw some high-profile contenders skip their Canadian premiere. In the past, award winners like “Green Book,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Nomadland” have taken home the Best Picture award at the Academy Awards. Other winners, including “Belfast,” “La La Land,” “Jojo Rabbit” and 2022 winner “The Fabelmans,” were all nominated for best picture.
The People’s Choice category was created in 1978. There have been seven Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards, five of which have come in the past two decades.
Alexander Payne’s boarding school dramaRetainerswas first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award, while Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film The Boy and the Heron was second runner-up.
“Dicks: The Musical,” a raunchy satire from “Borat” director Larry Charles, won the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award. A24 will release the film later this month. “Kill”, directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhatt, took second place in the “Midnight Madness” category, while “Hell of a Summer”, directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Brick, took second place.
The Audience Award for Documentary Film went to “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe,” a profile of children’s entertainer Ernie Coombs. “Summer Qamp” by Jane Markowitz and “Queen of the Mountain: Lakpa Sherpa Peaks” by Lucy Walker took first and second place in the non-fiction category.
An international jury consisting of filmmakers Barry Jenkins, Anthony Shim and Nadine Labaki announced that Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s film “Dear Jassie”, a true story of “Romeo and Juliet”, is the best film in the platform’s programme. It was a unanimous choice, and the prize is worth $20,000. “The film has the perfect blend of ingenuity, purpose and belief in its audience, creating a cinematic world that is rich and consistently realistic,” the jury said in a statement.
Sophie Dupuy’s “Solo,” a love story set in drag, took home the award for best Canadian feature film.
“American Fiction” received critical acclaim when it debuted at TIFF, with many reviewers singling out Jeffrey Wright’s performance as a college professor who achieves literary fame after writing an outrageously stereotypical book about black life as a joke only to see it become a best picture. -vendor. Miscellaneous Awards editor Clayton Davis predicted that the film could resonate with Oscar voters Announce that the film was “one of the best directorial debuts seen since Sam Mendes’s American Beauty.”
Jefferson, who was a writer on Succession and Watchmen, made his directorial debut with the film and wrote the screenplay. It is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” MGM will release the film this year.
This year’s Toronto edition was much more low-key, with fewer red carpets and dazzling premieres. Most of the stars, except for a few who appeared in smaller indies and had temporary promotional deals from the Screen Actors Guild, stayed away from the festival because of the strike. TIFF has hosted some notable films, such as Dumb Money, a look at the GameStop stock saga, and Woman of the Hour, a crime drama directed by Anna Kendrick that sold to Netflix for $11 million.
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