TIFF Goes Arab for Big Awards

Toronto wakes up to a massive hangover after a week and a half of stargazing.

Not to be outdone by a (apparently lacklustre and Baldwin-less) Emmy Awards, the Toronto International Film Festival honoured its best entrants this weekend, too, with the Lebanese film Where Do We Go Now? taking the $15,000 Cadillac People's Choice Prize. The $30,000 City of Toronto Award for the best Canadian film went to Phillipe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar, a film about an Algerian immigrant teaching elementary school in Montreal that we hear is a total heart-string tugger, while newcomer Nathan Morlando won the $15,000 Best Canadian First Feature for Edwin Boyd, about a WWII-vet-turned-actor-turned-bank-robber in Toronto. Consider us sold. But if we could only see one movie (sorry, “film”) from the festival, it would have to be The Raid, an Indonesian action movie that took home the Midnight Madness People's Choice Award. We hear it's, umm, bloody. Really bloody. The awards wrap up a week and a half of the world's biggest film festival, about which you can read more here.