The 44th Toronto's International Film Festival, one of the world's most important film festivals in which around 300 to 400 films are shown every year, has just come to a close. Although the TIFF doesn't bestow awards, the audience is in charge of deciding the best motion picture of each year, hence the aptly named People's Choice Award. This year, the honour went to Taiki Waititi ('Thor: Ragnarok' and 'What We Do in the Shadows') and his newest film 'Jojo Rabbit', a controversial piece about a boy in the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is none other than Adolf Hitler himself.
Although Waititi has been accused of trivialising the Second World War, 'Jojo Rabbit' was an immediate favourite of the public from its first showing. The film, which will premiere in the UK on the 3rd January 2020 under 20th Century Fox, is a black comedy, an 'anti-hate satire' based on the novel 'Caging Skies' by Christine Leunens, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a German mother that hides a Jewish child in her house whilst her own son is learning how to be a Nazi. Completing the cast are Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, young star Roman Griffin Davis, and Waititi himself, who portrays a kinder, crazy and, of course, imaginary version of the führer.
For the past 11 years, the Toronto International Film Festival has been the prelude to the Academy Awards. All of the award winners barring one, Nadine Labaki´s 'Where Do We Go Now?', stole into the race for Best Picture, and four of them ('Slumdog Millionaire', 'The King's Speech', 'Twelve Years a Slave' and 'Green Book') took home the golden statue. So, it's not unthinkable to suggest that this fable slash black comedy about a villainous German dictator and the Hitler Youth will be one of the nominees in 2020, and that superhero films such as 'Joker' and even, perhaps, the cinematographic showstopper of the year, 'Avengers: Endgame', may be joining it.
The Other Winners
'Jojo Rabbit' may have taken the prize home, but Noah Baumbach's 'Marriage Story' and Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite' came in second and third place respectively. In the documentary genre, Feras Fayyad's 'The Cave' triumphed, with other finalists including Garin Hovannisian's 'I'm Not Alone' and Bryce Dallas Howard's 'Dads', a film about contemporary fatherhood complete with testimonies from celebrity fathers such as Will Smith, Jimmy Fallon and Neil Patrick Harris. Spain also had a place on the winner´s list, bringing home the Midnight Madness Prize for Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's 'El hoyo'.
Other notable winners include Sophie Deraspe's 'Antigone' with the Canada Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film; Matthew Rankin's 'The Twentieth Century' with the City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film, and Oualid Mouanness' '1982' with the NEPTAC Award.
