Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton has won a Toronto International Film Festival award for his film Sweet Country.
The Platform prize comes only days after the film took out the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Thornton’s latest film is a period western set in 1929 in the Northern Territory starring Hamilton Morris as an Aboriginal stockman who kills a white station owner in self-defence.
The film festival jury called Sweet Country a “great saga of human fate” and a “deeply emotional metaphor for our common fight for dignity”.
Speaking at the festival, Mr Thornton said Indigenous storytellers are being given opportunities to speak the truth about history.
“As indigenous filmmakers, we have an opportunity to speak the truth—and tell our history right.”—SWEET COUNTRY’s Warwick Thornton #TIFF17 pic.twitter.com/GiVEmG0TVd
— TIFF (@TIFF_NET) September 17, 2017
