Toronto 2024: Winners and wrap-ups

The 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) ended on Sunday 15, September with the awards ceremony in which both juried and audience awards were presented. The Life of Chuck, American filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s faithful and heartwarming adaptation of a Stephen King short story, claimed the coveted People’s Choice Award as voted for by the TIFF audience.

More Stand by Me than Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck is divided into three acts, presented in reverse order. British actor Tom Hiddleston leads an ensemble cast including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Mark Hamill. It starts with Ejiofor’s Marty, a schoolteacher struggling to educate kids in a post-apocalyptic small American town. Alongside the rest of the town, Marty’s curiosity is drawn towards strategically placed billboards- presumably by a company- expressing thanks to a bespectacled man named Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Hiddleston) for serving “39 great years.”

Act two follows the titular character as an adult, played with a spring in his step by Hiddleston. A gleeful dance sequence, in which Chuck joins a young girl for a spontaneous swing session on the street is the high point of this section, and maybe even the entire film. The third act sees Chuck as a young boy growing up with his grandfather (Hamill) and traces how he comes to dance as a way of coping with tragedy.

On an artistic level, the schmaltzy Life of Chuck isn’t the strongest entry in the TIFF catalog of about 280 films in this year’s program. Indeed, titles like Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s musical crime thriller, and Sean Baker’s sex worker drama Anora, which both premiered at Cannes and emerged runners-up at TIFF, were stronger films. But the People’s Choice is a popularity prize and Flanagan’s film embraces a life-affirming sentimentality that makes it go down well with a welcoming audience.

On the documentary side, it was no surprise that The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal would claim top honors. A comprehensive account of the iconic Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, this four-part documentary directed by Mike Downie, brother of the band’s late singer Gord Downie plays well to a home crowd. Both insider account and detached deconstruction, Downie’s film interweaves never-before-seen archival footage sourced from friends and family with more recent interviews.

The documentary traces the band’s road to success, including the power dynamics, creative tensions, and bitter realities of life on the road. Attention is paid obviously to the passing of singer-songwriter Gord Downie in 2017 from brain cancer and the choice of the remaining members to stop performing under the Tragically Hip name. No Dress Rehearsal digs into the myth and emerges with an emotional and ultimately flattering account of a band considered a national treasure for their longevity and ability to capture a common Canadian experience, however mundane.

The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) jury awarded its prize in the festival’s Discovery section to Mother Mother, the assured debut feature by Somali-Canadian hip-hop star K’naan Warsame. Shot handheld style by César Charlone (The Constant Gardener) in bracing close-ups, Mother Mother offers full immersion into a world where the characters work through the moral dilemma presented by Warsame’s thoughtful screenplay.

A simplistic way to describe Mother Mother would be as a reverent story of motherhood. But it is much more than that as Warsame touches on the economic, social, and spiritual connections that bind people. The film acknowledges Somalia’s political difficulties tangentially, but its center is on the human beings who have to make a living within this social order. Included as well, is a fascinating conversation about how violence- none of which appears on screen- warps the diaspora’s relationship to the home country.

A widow, Qalifo (Maan Youssouf Ahmed), and her only son Asa (Elmi Rashid Elmi) have made a home in a camel farm in an autonomous community in rural Somalia. Asad lives in the shadow of his late father’s violent reputation but when he learns that his girlfriend has been seeing an American visitor Liban (Hassan Najib), a confrontation is inevitable. By the second act, things take an unexpected turn and Mother Mother unravels itself quietly to be an effective parable on forgiveness, second chances, and the limits of restorative justice.

Toronto International Film Festival 2024 winners

People’s Choice Award: The Life of Chuck
People’s Choice Documentary Award: The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsa
People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award: The Substance
Platform Competition Award: They Will Be Dust
Honorable Mention: Sylvia Chang in Daughter’s Daughter
Best Canadian Feature Film: Shepherds
Short Cuts Award for Best International Short Film: Deck 5B (Sweden)
Honorable Mention: Quota (Netherlands)
Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film: Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?
NETPAC Award: The Last of the Sea Women
FIPRESCI Jury Award: Mother Mother
Best Canadian Discovery Award: Universal Language
Honorable Mention: You are Not Alone