"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: Bening swims for gold in "Nyad"

by Cláudio Alves 

Amid arthouse offerings and experimental fare, daring feats of international cinema and midnight madness, the traditional Oscar movie can have a hard time standing out. Still, coexistence is possible, and there's always that beautiful occurrence, once every blue moon, when a festival's boldest piece is its most likely to succeed with awards. I wish I could say Nyad was that movie, but Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's narrative feature debut falls short of such lofty expectations. Yet, don't let this curmudgeon film critic's dissatisfaction dissuade you from predicting it in several categories. Sink or swim, Nyad is going for gold…

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TIFF '23: "A Ravaging Wind" delivers an acting masterclass

by Cláudio Alves

Sergi Lopez and Alfredo Castro work miracles in "A Ravaging Wind"

I swore to myself that, if ever I got to attend TIFF, I wouldn't capitulate to the tyranny of awards buzz. Smaller pictures and international sensations deserve as much attention as those movies bound for Academy consideration. Now that I'm here, that intention remains true, though new frustrations compound with old ones, especially concerning actors. In such a wide array of world cinema offerings, it's dispiriting that the only thespians that can headline articles and cause social media stirs are either Hollywood institutions or Sandra Hüller.

That's not a dig at those lucky few, merely an appreciation that there's greatness beyond the mainstream spotlight. In other words, everyone at TIFF should be talking about what Chilean star Alfredo Castro and Catalan star Sergi López  achieve in A Ravaging Wind… 

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