Indigenous Aussie director wins TIFF top honour

At least three of the principal awards of the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), handed out at the Bell Lightbox here, were scooped up by filmmakers who have surmounted major obstacles and ploughed lonely furrows to get here.
Australian director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton's "Sweet Country", an unflinching portrait of oppression by colonisers and resistance by Aborigines, bagged the coveted Platform Prize here on Sunday, underlining TIFF's growing emphasis on the celebration of indigenous voices in cinema.
This year's TIFF screened 280 features from 74 countries and hosted over 5,000 attendees from 89 nations and 1300 critics and journalists.

"Sweet Country", which stood out for its visual sweep and starkness, beat off competition from British director Clio Barnard's "Dark River", an impressively evocative drama about a brother and sister at loggerheads over their family farm in the Yorkshire countryside. "Dark River" had to settle for a Special Mention.
TIFF's Grolsch People's Choice Award went to the American film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", a darkly humorous drama about a mother seeking justice for her raped and murdered daughter.
Directed by Martin McDonagh, the film stars Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell.

The Toronto audience tends to vote for films that go on to make a splash during the awards season, as "La La Land", "12 Years a Slave" and "Slumdog Millionaire", to name a few, have done in the past.

The FIPRESCI Prize for the festival's Discovery section, dedicated to first-time and sophomore outings, was bagged by Montreal-based Iranian director Sadaf Foroughi's "Ava".
The film tells the story of a young girl who is constantly at odds with her conservative parents and the school authorities because she refuses to see the world through their restrictive prisms.
"Sweet Country" was adjudged the best of 12 curated films in the Toronto Platform competed by a jury made up of Wim Wenders, Chen Kaige and Malgorzata Szumowska.
Awarding the prize to Thornton's stark, deeply moving film, the jury said: "This is a spiritual epic taking place in 1929 in Australia's Northern Territory... It is a great saga of human fate, and its themes of race and struggle for survival are handled in such a simple, rich, unpretentious and touching way, that it became for us a deeply emotional metaphor for our common fight for dignity."

Accepting the award, Thornton said: "A lot of our history is written by colonisers... Indigenous filmmakers can offer an alternative narrative about the past... We can make better choices about the future if we understand our past."
"Sweet Country" won a Special Jury Prize at this year's Venice Film Festival, which ended a little over a week back.
In 2009, Thornton's first film, Samson and Delilah, received the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Talking to PTI, Thornton said the long gap between his first film and the second was entirely due to the struggle to raise production funds.

"When I need money, I go and shoot a film for another director," added the Alice Springs-based cameraman-turned- director.
Foroughi, born and raised in Iran, educated in France and living in Canada since 2009, faced an equally uphill task in getting Ava made.
"After years of waiting, I did not find a producer, so I produced the film myself," she told this correspondent. "I am writing my next film and I am more confident than ever now that I will have a producer on board from the outset."
Awarding a special mention to British director Clio Barnard's "Dark River", the jury said: "This film, deeply rooted in the Yorkshire countryside, convinced us, as its characters and actors, its photography, its story and its sense of place were all so much ONE, so utterly believable and controlled, that we were totally taken by it."

Vancouver-based director Wayne Wapeemukwa, whose film Luk' Luk'I won the City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film, perhaps summed up the spirit of the evening best.
"My film split the audience. I will continue to make films that split audiences. I believe that our strength will come primarily from diversity," he said in his award acceptance speech.