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| Alejandro Monteverde of the film "Bella" poses for portraits in the Chanel Celebrity Suite at the Four Season hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival, 10 September 2006 in Toronto, Canada. |
Mexican-born director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's romantic drama "Bella" has won the Toronto film festival's top prize awarded by audiences, but critics picked "Death of a President."
The film about two individuals whose lives converge and turn upside down on a single day in New York City is Monteverde's first feature film.
"I really hope that this is not a dream and that I don't wake up at film school," said Monteverde Saturday. "This festival is my first festival. It's my first film. It's my first everything."
The film follows cook Jose, played by Eduardo Verastegui, on a tour of New York City with a striking, but distraught waitress (Tammy Blanchard) whom he barely knows, but tries to comfort and begs to know after she is fired from his brother's (Manny Perez) restaurant.
Previously, "American Beauty" and "Chariots of Fire" won Oscars for best picture after Toronto audiences gave them a nod.
Last year's People's Choice Award winner "Tsotsi" went on to win an Oscar for best foreign-language film.
"Death of a President" about a fictional assassination of US President George W. Bush, despite poor reviews, won the Prize of International Critics "for theaudacitywith which it distorts reality, to reveal a larger truth," the jury said in a statement.
British director Gabriel Range's cautionary tale told in documentary style about an October 2007 assassination of Bush in Chicago amid Iraq war protests mixes archival footage with narrative elements to explore the loss of civil liberties, theramificationsof war and the manipulation of mass media.
The film has already sparked controversy in the United States about the US president's world view, fed mostly by Bush'sdetractors, and others who deemed it inappropriate to bespeak the death of a living person, especially a US president.
(Agencies)
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