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.