MovieGlobe: Our TIFF'14 Report

Adapted from an article by: Badreldin H. Ali*

TIFF'14 was concluded last Sunday and the Norwegian film "Imitation Game"declared winner of the festival's major award, People's Choice Award which was received by the film director Norwegian Morten Tyldum. On Monday art pages in Canadian press were wondering if the movie would find its way to the Academy Awards (Oscar) as usual for a win.

Cumberbatch in Imitation Game

It is known that six films that had won the major award at TIFF found their way to the finals at the Oscars for best film category with three of these achieving the Oscar. The last of these winning movies was "Twelve Years a Slave" 2013. The TIFF as a festival does categorize movies as 'Best Movie' or actors as 'Best Actress', it rather depends on the highest voting by the audience.
TIFF has about seven other awards and gives a winning documentary a similarly-named award, i.e. People's Choice Best Documentary. Sudanese Cinema had entered the prize race with the documentary film "Beats of The Antonov" by filmmaker Hajooj Kuka which attracted a large number of Sudanese Canadians living in Toronto and nearby cities who interacted positively with the filmmaker's rendering of events in war and famine stricken zones.

Kuka

Many of the audience, whom I spoke to, believed that the movie deserved an Oscar as it presented a unique cinematic treatment of the question of Sudanese Identity, torn in the everlasting struggle between Arabism and Africanism. The uniqueness of the movie, they believed, stemmed from the movie's approach to the question from a musical point of view that highlighted the role played by beats, singing and dance in healing the wounds of war and hence was the film's name "Beats of The Antanov", drawn from the name of the plane that kept bombing marginalized areas
of Sudan.

Image from "Beats of The Antonov"

Canadian movie "Felix et Meira" from Quebec's Maxime Giroux, which was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the TIFF'14 and the San Sebastian Film Festival, won the award for Best Canadian Feature at TIFF. This film had no luck at Cannes 14, competing with the winner of the jury award Xavier Dolan's "Mommy"; himslef a Canadian. In that same competition was Stephane lafleur's "You Are Sleeping, Nicole" which drew the attention of artistic circles and was put among the Fifteen Promising moviemakers.

Maxime Giroux

More on these subjects to come.

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*Dramatist and Writer who lives in Toronto, Canada.