In between all the late night parties, meetings, and schmoozing sessions, 473,000 audiences and industry pundits, miraculously, also managed to catch some films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Some ballots were cast, too, and the Grolsch People's Choice Award went to Lenny Abrahamson's Room, told through the eyes of a young boy who'd never known a world beyond the confines of a single 10-by-10-foot room. The two runner-ups were Pan Nalin's comedy Angry Indian Goddesses and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, about Boston Globe journalists that uncovered the Massachusetts Catholic sex abuse scandal.
Ilya Naishuller's Russian cyborg film Hardcore, touted as the world's first action-adventure film to be entirely shot from the first person perspective, won the Midnight Madness Award, with Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room and Todd Strauss-Schulson's The Final Girls as runner ups.
Meanwhile, Evgeny Afineevsky's Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom was the People's Choice on the documentary side.
New to TIFF this year was the $25,000 Toronto Platform Prize handed out by an international jury. Ironically, the prize went to a Canadian, Alan Zweig's Hurt, about cross-country runner Steve Fonyo's difficult journey through life. Stephen Dunn's Closet Monster, about a young gay man's coming of age, won the $30,000 Canada Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film.
The 11-day festival closed with a special treat for cinema lovers, a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Vertigo, accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the now 82-year-old star of the film, Kim Novak.
Here are some more films that you should know about that we caught at the festival.