Toronto: Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Life of Chuck’ Wins Audience Award
Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival as its 2024 edition wrapped with renewed celebrity heat but still in the shadow of Venice and Cannes.
The Stephen King novella adaptation stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a genre-tripping film about embracing hope in the face of tragedy and had a world premiere in Toronto. Flanagan in a statement thanked TIFF for the top audience award prize: “I’m absolutely overwhelmed. We’re so grateful that The Life of Chuck connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.”
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The second runner up for the People’s Choice Award was Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a queer crime musical headed to Netflix that earned the jury prize in Cannes for the director, while the titular lead Karla Sofía Gascón became the first transgender woman to win the best actress crown at the French festival, an award she shared with fellow stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoe Salda?a. The first runner-up was Sean Baker’s sex worker screwball comedy Anora, which earned the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
TIFF’s top audience award is considered a barometer of future Oscar nominations as Hollywood’s awards season kicks into gear. Previous TIFF audience award winners — including Room, La La Land, 12 Years a Slave and Nomadland — received a lift from the normally celebrity-drenched Canadian festival on their way to Academy Award wins.
The People’s Choice award for best documentary went to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, from director Mike Downie and Prime Video and MGM Amazon Studios. The first runner-up in the category is Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper, a road trip movie with Will Ferrell and former SNL head writer Harper Steele that bowed at Sundance and is headed to Netflix, and the second runner-up is Your Tomorrow from director Ali Weinstein, a film about Toronto’s Ontario Place that bowed at TIFF.
And the audience award for best Midnight Madness title at TIFF went to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which debuted in Cannes and stars Demi Moore as a fading Hollywood actress feuding with the manifestation of her younger self, played by Margaret Qualley. The first runner-up is: Dead Talents Society, directed by John Hsu, which had a North American bow in Toronto after bowing in Taiwan and the second runner-up is Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship after its world premiere at TIFF.
The People’s Choice awards are voted on by TIFF attendees. Toronto’s 2024 edition, a blend of studio Oscar contenders and arthouse gems, saw a rebound of celebrity heat after last year when the Hollywood actors strike kept SAG-AFTRA members from touting their latest films at TIFF and other fall film festivals unless their producers signed interim agreements.
The 2024 edition was subdued, however, compared to Venice and Cannes, as Toronto hosted no official press conferences to help market films aiming at Oscars, the Golden Globes and other prestigious awards and has no official film competition. As Hollywood contracts, celebrities made red carpet appearances in Toronto and waved to fans outside Roy Thomson Hall, but with less glitz and glamour as on the Croisette and the Lido.
In juried prize-giving, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Marques-Marcet’s They Will Be Dust, an ensemble drama about a woman with an incurable disease headed to Switzerland to end her life, won the Platform prize. “I want to thank all the activists or right-to-die associations that help us think how we’re going to this thing. We’re going to be there. So hopefully we can think and talk and open the discussion about how we want to do it,” Marques-Marcet said about the hot button issue of euthanasia when accepting his prize at TIFF Lightbox on Sunday.
The FIPRESCI prize went to Mother Mother, directed by Somali Canadian recording artist K’naan Warsame. And the NETPAC award for the best Asian film by a first- or second-time feature director at TIFF went to The Last of the Sea Women, a documentary from director Sue Kim and produced by Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Elsewhere, the Canadian Discovery Award for emerging filmmakers went to Universal Language, an absurdist homage to Iranian cinema by director Matthew Rankin. And the best Canadian feature film prize picked by a TIFF jury went to Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, a drama about a Montreal copywriter who reinvents himself as a sheep herder in the French Alps. Deraspe earlier won the Best Canadian Feature award for Antigone in 2019.
The Short Cuts award for best international film went to Deck 5B, by Swedish director Malin Ingrid Johansson, while the best Canadian short film trophy was picked up Bec Pecout for Are You Scared to be Yourself Because You Think You Might Fail.
On the film sales front, no deals were unveiled in Toronto during the past 10 days after another muted year in 2023 when the writers and actors strikes and SAG-AFTRA restrictions kept buyers from either traveling to Toronto or making deals for acquisition titles on the ground.
The quiet informal sales market follows Toronto announcing it will launch an official content market in 2026. Also this year, global political tensions became flashpoints for some TIFF titles. Protesters disrupted TIFF’s opening night ceremony on Sept. 5 with chants that Royal Bank of Canada, the official bank partner of the festival, “funds genocide.”
And Russian-Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova faced a backlash in Venice and then in Toronto as Ukrainian Canadians protested her documentary Russians at War in Toronto ahead of its North American premiere. TIFF organizers eventually canceled the public screenings for the controversial film over security concerns during the event’s 11-day run, and then rescheduled the film to screen on Sept. 17 at TIFF Lightbox.
A spokesperson for the Toronto Police Services confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday that the decision to pause screenings for Russians at War was made “independently by event organizers,” without input from local police authorities.
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