The Toronto Film Festival will honor music icon and activist Dionne Warwick with a special tribute award at the festival’s TIFF Tribute Awards gala next month.
The award will come as the documentary Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over receives a world premiere at TIFF. The film, by directors Dave Wooley and David Heilbroner, recounts Warwick’s six-decade career in both pop music and Black and LGBTQ activism.
Warwick is a former goodwill ambassador for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and worked early as an artist to heighten public awareness of the AIDS epidemic. And Cree/Metis filmmaker Danis Goulet will receive the TIFF Emerging Talent Award at the festival’s awards show gala on Sept. 18 in Toronto.
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Goulet’s Night Raiders, an indigenous-themed zombie pic, will receive a North American premiere in Toronto as a gala presentation at Roy Thomson Hall after a world bow in Berlin.
“A legend in her own right, Dionne Warwick has been charting firsts her entire career, a six-decade hitmaker with boundless talent, and a tireless activist for LGBTQ+ rights, and Danis Goulet is a visionary filmmaker, using film as a powerful vehicle for Indigenous storytelling and social change,” Joana Vicente, executive director and co-head of TIFF, said in a statement.
The 2021 TIFF Tribute Awards will take place on Sept. 18, on the final day of Toronto’s 46th edition, and will include announcements on the winners of the festival’s People’s Choice Award and Platform Jury prize. The People’s Choice Award annually handed out by the Toronto festival is seen as a bellwether for the upcoming Hollywood awards season.
Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland earned TIFF’s top People’s Choice Award in 2020 on its way to an eventual Academy Awards triumph. Toronto organizers earlier announced TIFF Tribute Awards to be handed out to Benedict Cumberbatch, Jessica Chastain, Canadian Indigenous director Alanis Obomsawin and Dune director Denis Villeneuve.
The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 9 to 18.
