Toronto: End of Days (The Awards)

Yes, they give out prizes at the Toronto Film Festival, although by the 16th, hardly anyone was left in town to pay attention. (The press release announcing the awards noted that the combined running time of all the films was 27,747 minutes. Funny, it only felt like 19,268.)

There's no one prize of prizes -- no Silver Bear or Palme D'Or. There *is* a People's Choice award, voted by audiences, that this year went to "Bella" (in photo above), a tiny two-character drama from writer-director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. (Cue sound of entire press corps who attended Toronto thundering to find a screener of a movie they overlooked.) Runners-up were France's "Mon Meilleur Ami" and the crowd-pleasing documentary "Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing."

The Diesel Discovery award, voted on by the international media, went to Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier's "Reprise," a comedy drama about young writers living in Oslo and yearning for Paris. The Swarovski Cultural Innovation Award, chosen by "an international jury of major visual artists," went to Turkish filmmaker Ozer Kiziltan's "Takva -- A Man's Fear of God."

The Prize of the International Critics, also known as the Fipresci Prize, went to the controversial "Death of a President," "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." That's stretching things, if you ask me, since the film actually isn't audacious enough: after dispatching the Pres in a briefly seen flurry of news-footage, the mock documentary slows to a crawl as it investigates various possible suspects. The larger point -- that Dick Cheney and company will stop at nothing to buttress popular support for overseas warmongering -- isn't exactly fresh groceries and the production quality of "Death" is just about on the level of a Court TV re-enactment. But people see what they want to see, and some people saw that title and decided it was genius enough.

The Toronto City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film went to -- drum roll, please -- "Manufactured Landscapes."