Topp Twins win audience award at Toronto!

Leanne Pooley’s documentary The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls has won the People’s Choice award for Best Documentary at the Toronto Film Festival.

This is the first year Toronto's had an audience award for documentaries and, in no small feat, Topp Twins beat out Michael Moore’s new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. Previous People’s Choice winners include Slumdog Millionaire, Tsotsi, Whale Rider, Hotel Rwanda and American Beauty. The People's Choice for best feature film this year went to American drama Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (more on the film here).

We reported this week that the two other Kiwi films at Toronto had received a hostile reception, but Leanne Pooley’s Topp Twins received standing ovations and a critical thumbs up. The festival described the film as “fun, disarming and musically provocative”. Variety, the major US industry paper, said “A documentary that has you falling in love with two of the crazier people you've never met... could well add Jools and Lynda Topp to a list that includes spring lamb and Lord of the Rings - that is, gifts from New Zealand to a world that usually doesn't pay it any attention” (read the full Variety review here). Gee thanks.

Of course, this is nothing we didn’t already know – the film has been well loved here, become NZ’s highest grossing documentary ever and was praised across the board by NZ’s critics (see the Flicks.co.nz review, plus other press reviews here).

The Twins and director Leanne Pooley were in Canada for the festival. Lynda Topp told Newstalk ZB that to win was “a dream come true”. She said Canadian audiences had found the pair refreshing and they’d won them over by just being themselves. Hear hear.

http://www.flicks.co.nz/news/topp-twins-peoples-choice-winner-at-toronto-film-fest/