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"Amelie" Tops Subdued Toronto Fest
Sunday, September 16, 2001 12:00 AM EDT
The 26th annual Toronto Film Festival opened with a gala and closed with a grimace.
For the first five days, the gathering was "near perfect," festival director Piers Handling told reporters gathered for a subdued and somber closing press conference.
But "as the incomprehensible events of September 11, 2001 unfolded, we came together globally to grieve for and comfort our neighbors, friends and colleagues and their families in America and around the world who were touched by the devastation," he said.
The normally joyous closing brunch was, like all of the festival's parties and red-carpet events, canceled. In its place, reporters and a handful of filmmakers still stranded because of U.S. flying restrictions, gathered together as the festival handed out its awards.
This was the festival's chance to inject some hope into the traumatized film community, and they came through. The awards all went to films that centered on positive themes and hope, rather than cynicism and despair.
The top prize, the AGF People's Choice Award, voted on by the audiences at the festival, went to the French film La Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie from Montmartre). Set in Paris, the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film is the story of a waitress named Amelie who sets out to make the world a better place by doing such things as writing love letters from dead husbands to their widows and publishing a timid writer's book. A major hit in France, it was shut out at the Cannes film festival.
Toronto's People's Choice winner has been prophetic when it comes to Oscar time. The last two winners, American Beauty and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, both made a big splash at the Academy Awards.
The runners-up were two films set in India: Digvijay Singh's coming-of-age tale, Maya, and Mira Nair's romantic comedy Monsoon Wedding, which won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month.
The Volkswagen Discovery Award, an award for a promising newcomer voted on by the press, went to The Chicken Rice War. Inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the film tells the story of two warring families who operate rival food-court stands.
The French film Inch'Aallah Dimanche, won the award given by the International Federation of Critics (aka the foreign press award), for its "sensitivity and fresh humor in dealing with the conditions of Third World Women, daily racism and clashes between cultures."
The Toronto-CITY Award for best Canadian feature went to Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). The film, which won the Camera d'Or at Cannes for top first-time filmmaker, was written in the language of Canada's Arctic aboriginals, the Inuit, and used mostly Inuit actors and crew. Roger Ebert called it "an astonishing epic" that tells the ancient story "of a crime that ruptures the trust within a closely knit group, and how justice is achieved and healing begins."
The CITY-TV award for best Canadian first feature film went to Winnipeg's Sean Garrity for Inertia. The film centers on a series of relationships between people in their early 20s who are carried away by their sex drives. The jury citation said Inertia "heralds the arrival of a filmmaker of great promise.
Source: E! Online
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