Toronto Film Festival

Alejandro Monteverde

The 10-day long 31st edition of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) came to an end last night. Hundreds of film celebrites from around the world, including Penelope Cruz, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Sir Ridley Scott, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Lopez, attended this year's TIFF.

'Bella', a small-budget first-time feature from Mexican-born director Alejandro Monteverde, captured the People's Choice Award by a vote of regular filmgoers at TIFF. 'Bella' tells the story of two people whose lives converge and turn upside down on a single day in New York. The People's Choice Award is often seen as an indicator of future Academy Award nominations. Past recipients of this top prize at Toronto include Oscar Best Picture winners 'American Beauty', 'Life is Beautiful' and 'Chariots of Fire'. Last year's winner, 'Tsotsi', won an Oscar for best foreign language film.

However, Bella's surprise win was overshadowed somewhat by the triumph of 'Death of a President'. Directed by Britain's Gabriel Range, the 93-minute feature was awarded the 15th annual Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) by a five-member panel who lauded the film for "the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." In this instance, Range combines staged and archival footage to explore, in pseudo-documentary fashion, the fall-out from the imagined assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush in 2007 and offers a critique of the contemporary US political landscape.

Venice Film Festival Ends

The 63rd edition of the Venice Film Festival, which by the way is the oldest film festival of the world, winds up on Saturday after a red carpet award ceremony on the glamorous Lido beach front.

The Chinese movie "Sanxia Haoren," or "Still Life," on Saturday took this year's Golden Lion, the top award at the Venice Film Festival. The award to Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke's film was unexpected, and trumped a number of front-running candidates for the top award. The film was shot in the old village of Fengjie, which has been destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, and tells of people who go back there. More than 1.13 million Chinese have been relocated to make way for the dam, many of them complaining of bleak prospects in their new homes above the waterline or in other parts of China.

Helen Mirren, best actress

Helen Mirren and Ben Affleck won this year's top acting awards. Mirren won for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen." Affleck won for his role in "Hollywoodland" which dramatizes an investigation into the death of George Reeves, star of the 1950s TV show "Adventures of Superman."

Last year the Golden Lion award went to Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain". But this year the competition was tougher with a number of frontrunning competitors.

Film critics and the public alike have hailed Stephen Frears' "The Queen," in which Helen Mirren plays a monarch hopelessly out of touch with her people when Princess Diana dies in a Paris car crash in 1997. Leading the chasing pack behind "The Queen" for best picture was Emilio Estevez's "Bobby," about a dozen or so characters who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968. Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins and Lindsay Lohan appear in a touching story that works real news footage from the day of the assassination into the movie.

Ben Affleck, best actor

Italy's "Nuovo Mondo," or "Golden Door," (director: Emanuele Crialese) the last of the 21 competition films to screen to the press, also made a late charge. The film is about a Sicilian family of illiterate peasants who travel to the United States in search of a better life at the beginning of the last century. After the world premiere screeing, it won a 15-minute ovation.
Other contenders for the best film Golden Lion include French veteran Alain Resnais' "Private Fears in Public Places," an intimate account of ordinary people searching for happiness in a snow-covered Paris.

Alfonso Cuaron also won fans for his terrifying vision of London in 2027 in "Children of Men". "Daratt," Chad's first competition entry about coming to terms with the horrors of civil war, was seen as an outside bet. "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" by Tsai Ming-Liang explores the lives of migrant workers in Malaysia after economic collapse.

Despite Bobby's success in Venice, other U.S. competition entries fared less well, with Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" booed at a press screening and Allen Coulter's "Hollywoodland," starring Ben Affleck, Diane Lane and Adrien Brody drawing mixed reviews. "The Black Dahlia," starring Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett, was also seen as a disappointment.