The Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award for Documentaries is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to the film rated as the year's most popular documentary film with festival audiences. [1] The award was first introduced in 2009; [2] prior to its introduction, documentary films were eligible for the Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award, with two documentaries having won that award and six having been named as runners-up.
After the award is announced, the festival offers a repeat screening of the winner at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on the final day of the festival.
Unlike the main People's Choice Award for feature films, however, the documentary award does not have a similar record of being a reliable predictor of Academy Award nominations.
The voting process is the same as for the feature film People's Choice: at each documentary film screening, attendees are invited to "vote" for the film by rating it on their ticket stubs and leaving the stubs in voting boxes outside the theatre after the show. [3]
In other key awards handed out on Sunday afternoon (17), Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country claimed the Toronto Platform Prize, while Joseph Kahn's Bodied won the Grolsch People's Choice Midnight Madness Award. Agnès Varda and JR's Faces Places took the Grolsch People's Choice Documentary Award.