Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave.
12 Years A Slave picked up the People’s Choice Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival Sunday, possibly signaling it will have a good run in the season’s awards race.
Past winners of the TIFF People’s Choice Audience Award include Best Picture winners The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire as well as American Beauty and Chariots Of Fire which went on to take the Best Picture prize at the Academy Awards, noted Deadline. Nominees who received the TIFF prize include Silver Linings Playbook and Precious.
Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, meanwhile won the People’s Choice Award in the documentary category, according to Indiewire, with Beyond the Edge and Hi-Ho Mistahey named as Runners up among non-fiction titles, while the People’s Choice Award for the festival’s Midnight Madness section went to Why Don’t You Play In Hell. Best Canadian feature went to When Jews Were Funny and All The Wrong Reasons won the TIFF’s Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award.
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, stars  Chiwetel Ejioforand as a free black man who is abducted into slavery in pre-Civil War-era America. The Square, meanwhile, is an epic view on the continuing Egyptian revolution seen through a cross-section of participants in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Both film will have debut at the upcoming New York Film Festival.
The 38th Toronto International Film Festival opened with The Fifth Estate and included over 300 films from 70 countries September 5 – 15.
