This is also the second festival honour bestowed upon La La Land in the past few weeks, after Stone scooped the award for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month (Sep16).
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“La La Land” is from 31-year-old writer-director Damien Chazelle, who made a splash with his 2014 film “Whiplash”, an intense study of a jazz drummer’s quest to perfection.
“This is that kind of experience that changes when you see it with a whole audience as opposed to sitting in your living room”. Also starring in the film is Lupita Nyong’o, who found fame after her supporting actress Oscar win for 12 Years a Slave.
Last year’s victor was “Room”, which got four Oscar nominations, including best picture.
The film beat out Garth Davis’s “Lion” and Mira Nair’s “Queen of Katwe” for the honour.
David Oyelowo features in not just one but two films at TFF, playing Robert in Disney’s Queen of Katwe, which follows Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), a Ugandan chess prodigy who lives in rural Uganda.
Diverse stories, typically unheard voices and debut or emerging filmmakers also figured heavily among the directors honoured by TIFF on Sunday. The credit sequence alone puts you in a great mood, so I’ll be very interested to see how far it goes into awards season.
The impressive film by Chilean director Pablo Larrain won TIFF’s Platform Prize, a fledgling, juried honour created to champion artistic filmmaking which is now in its second year.
FIPRESCI special presentations award: I Am Not Madame Bovary, directed by Feng Xiaogang (China). It won the $25,000 Toronto Platform Prize, the festival’s juried program that champions director’s cinema from around the world.
The award will be handed out at the film fest’s closing banquet today. It’s inspired by Quebec’s 2012 student protest movement against a proposed increase in tuition fees. And the NETPAC award for the best Asian film receiving a world or worldwide premiere in Toronto was given to Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between, an Arabic and Israeli language film about three Palestinian women living in Tel Aviv.
Other notable screenings include Loving, Jeff Nichols” film about an interracial couple from Virginia, who in 1958 are sentenced to prison for their marriage, and Moonlight, the story of an African-American man who lives in Miami in the heart of the “War on Drugs’, who struggles to find himself and his sexuality.
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“This was a really good year”, said Handling.
