The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2024 Toronto Film Festival has gone to The Life of Chuck, first runner-up is Emilia Pérez, and second runner-up is Anora. The Documentary Award goes to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, and the Midnight Madness winner is The Substance.
Both runners-up Emilia Pérez and Anora were big winners at Cannes in May (the latter taking the Palme d’Or), but Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck was a TIFF world premiere and a surprise winner of this award.
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Tom Hiddleston stars in the film based on King’s novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. It is an unusual winner here for this award as it currently is looking for distribution and has no set release date, which means it could be the first People’s Choice winner in recent memory to not be currently considered a contender in the 2024 awards-season race. It has been called “an apocalyptic version of It’s a Wonderful Life,” and no doubt this award will speed up a distribution deal for the movie, which is atypical of King’s bread and butter but closer in spirit to the likes of movies like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, the latter of which went on to land an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
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Voted on by audience members since 1978 and often considered a harbinger for the Best Picture Oscar, the TIFF People’s Choice Award has been won by such eventual Best Picture Academy Award winners as Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty and Chariots of Fire. Among those that went on to Best Picture nominations include last year’s winner American Fiction, as well as The Fabelmans, Belfast, JoJo Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Room, La La Land, The Imitation Game, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, Life Is Beautiful, Places in the Heart and The Big Chill.
RELATED: 25 Years Of TIFF People’s Choice Award Winners: Photo Gallery
Here is this year’s TIFF awards winners:
People’s Choice Award
The Life of Chuck, dir. Mike Flanagan | USA
The first runner-up: Emilia Pérez, dir. Jacques Audiard | France/USA/Mexico
The second runner-up: Anora, dir. Sean Baker | USA
People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award
The Substance, dir. Coralie Fargeat | United Kingdom/USA/France
The first runner-up: Dead Talents Society, dir. John Hsu | Taiwan
The second runner-up: Friendship, dir. Andrew DeYoung | USA
People’s Choice Documentary Award
The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, dir. Mike Downie | Canada
The first runner-up: Will & Harper, dir. Josh Greenbaum | USA
The second runner-up: Your Tomorrow, dir. Ali Weinstein | Canada
SHORT CUTS AWARDS
Best International Film
Deck 5B, dir. Malin Ingrid Johansson | Sweden
Honourable mention: Quota, dir. Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins, Marieke Blaauw | Netherlands
Best Canadian Film:
Are You Scared To Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?, dir. Bec Pecaut | Canada
FIPRESCI AWARD
Mother Mother, dir. K’naan Warsame | Somalia
NETPAC AWARD
The Last of the Sea Women, dir. Sue Kim | USA
BEST CANADIAN DISCOVERY AWARD
Universal Language, dir. Matthew Rankin | Canada
Honourable mention: You Are Not Alone, dirs. Marie-Hélène Viens, Philippe Lupien | Canada
BEST CANADIAN FEATURE FILM AWARD
Shepherds, dir. Sophie Deraspe | Canada
PLATFORM COMPETITION AWARD
They Will Be Dust, dir. Carlos Marques-Marcet | Spain, Italy, Switzerland
Honourable mention: Sylvia Chang in Daughter’s Daughter, dir. Huang Xi | Taiwan