Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota won the Grolsch People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. Bala’s second movie after his unreleased debut Peddlers (2012) is about a man who feels no pain, and who uses this skill to learn martial arts and hunt down criminals.
The movie stars Abhimanyu Dassani and Radhika Madan. Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota is the first Indian film to have been selected for TIFF’s Midnight Madness category, which showcases genre titles. The film has been produced by Ronnie Screwvala Productions and is scheduled for a November 23 release in India.
British director Sandhya Suri won the Best Short Film prize for The Field, in which she captures the efforts of a female agricultural worker to prepare for the annual harvest. Suri’s documentaries include I for India (2007) and Around India with a Movie Camera (2018).
The Grolsch People’s Choice Award went to Peter Farelly’s Green Book. Peter Farelly, along with his brother Bobby, has previously directed Dumb and Dumber (1994), There’s Something About Mary (1998) and Shallow Hal (2001). Green Book is a fictionalised account of the racism encountered by real-life classical pianist Don Shirley (Masherala Ali) and his bouncer Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) during a tour of the American South. The comedy will be released on November 21.
The first runner-up was Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, in which the Moonlight director explores the attempts of an African-American woman to clear her husband’s name in a crime. The second runner-up was Alfonso Cuaron’s migration-themed Roma.
The Groisch People’s Choice Documentary Award went to Free Solo by E Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The film follows Alex Honnold as he becomes the first person to free solo climb the 3,000-foot El Capitan Wall in the Yosemite National Park in the United States of America.
