Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden won the $20,000 CAD 2019 Toronto Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Based on the Jack London novel of the same name, Pietro Marcello’s latest follows a sailor (Luca Marinelli) trying to remake himself as a writer, in this passionate and timeless story of class consciousness and failed ideals.

“Our main prize goes to a thrilling and eloquent work of art that we agreed on unanimously and instantaneously,” said the jury s comprised of award-winning filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, Berlinale Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian, and international film critic Jessica Kiang . “A politically and philosophically provocative story told with extraordinary cinematic invention and grace, this film reaffirms a faith that is easy to lose in 2019: that the cinema we know is an iceberg with nine-tenths still remaining to be discovered. This is a classic story told in a novel manner that dips below the surface to find highly unconventional, often archival modes of expression that are irreverent and anachronistic and yet that honor and participate in the history of cinema.”

Additionally, the jury awarded two honorable mentions. One of the recipients is Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 ft, which the jury highlighted as “a film that creates a horror-movie level of buzzing tension out of a mercilessly close-up, yet deeply compassionate portrait of an unstable young woman, brought unforgettably to life in Deragh Campbell’s riveting central performance.

The other honorable mention was awarded to Alice Winocour’s Proxima, which the jury considered “a beautifully down-to-earth, procedural approach to a story about the lure of space vying with the bonds of home, that is for once told from the point of view of a woman who does not apologize for finding as much joy in her vocation as in her family.”