Last January after compiling the second annual CAST Awards, my lovely wife Brooke gave me an idea. I’d been complaining that films that I see at TIFF sometimes fall between the cracks because I might vote for them in the year I saw them at the festival, while they may not actually get released theatrically until the following year. Simple, she said. Why not do a special edition of the awards just after TIFF? So that’s just what I’ve done.
Here are the CAST Top 10 based on the votes of 18 submitted ballots. Voters ranked up to 10 films on their ballot from top to bottom, with first choices receiving 10 points, second choices 9, etc. The Points column lists the total score for each film, Mentions indicates how many voters included it in their Top Ten, Average is the average point score, and Firsts shows how many voters chose it as their favourite TIFF film.
In the case of points ties, the film with the higher number of first-place votes is listed first, then by number of mentions. Because our sample size is quite small, these “rankings” don’t actually mean much, but I thought it would give a good idea of what this particular group of festivalgoers enjoyed this year. I’m curious to see how many of these show up in our regular year-end CAST ballot and how they do.
| FIRSTS | ||||
| 1. The Master | 50 | 8 | 6.25 | 0 |
| 2. Sightseers | 47 | 8 | 5.75 | 1 |
| 3. Amour | 35 | 4 | 8.75 | 3 |
| 4. Berberian Sound Studio | 34 | 5 | 6.8 | 1 |
| 5. Ghost Graduation | 32 | 6 | 5.33 | 0 |
| 6. Cloud Atlas | 32 | 5 | 6.4 | 0 |
| 7. Stories We Tell | 30 | 3 | 10 | 3 |
| 8. Blancanieves | 30 | 4 | 7.5 | 1 |
| 9. Leviathan | 26 | 3 | 8.67 | 2 |
| 10. Frances Ha | 26 | 5 | 5.2 | 0 |
Participants:
- Gregory Ashman
- Corey Atad (@CoreyAtad)
- Peter Chu (@pchu1234)
- Jay Clarke (@Horror_Section)
- Danielle D’Ornellas (@ellstar)
- Jonathan Doyle (@Media_Party)
- Katarina Gligorijevic (@katarinag)
- Kurt Halfyard (@triflic)
- Leora Heilbronn (@leoraheilbronn)
- Matt Hodgson (@EntertainMaven)
- Richard Iwasa (@TIFFtalk)
- James McNally (@TOscreenshots)
- Ryan McNeil (@Matinee_CA)
- Corey Pierce (@coreypierceart)
- Lindsay Ragone (@LindsayRagone)
- Kiva Reardon (@kiva_jane)
- Bob Turnbull (@TheLogicalMind)
- David Voigt (@PopCulturePoet)
And for those still reading, here is my final TIFF CAST ballot:
My TIFF CAST Ballot