Toronto Film Festival audience award goes to Room

Room is based on the Booker-nominated bestseller

Captivity drama Room has picked up the People's Choice award at the Toronto Film Festival, after winning the popular vote from cinema audiences at the event.

Directed by Ireland's Lenny Abrahamson, it is based on the bestseller by Emma Donoghue, who was also born in Dublin.

The Midnight Madness audience award went to Ilya Naishuller's Hardcore.

Netflix's Winter On Fire: Ukraine's Fight For Freedom won the documentary People's Choice.

Room recounts the story of a woman who is kidnapped and gives birth to a son while being held captive - only managing to escape when he is five years old - and their struggle to adapt to the outside world.

Jonas Cuaron (r) cast Gael Garcia Bernal (L) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in Desierto

Donoghue, who now lives in Canada, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2010 for the novel.

The film stars Brie Larson as the mother and eight-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who have both been winning critical praise for their harrowing performances.

'Talent and passion'

In a statement read at the award ceremony, director Abrahamson said: "I'm so honoured Room has been chosen by the Toronto audience to win the People's Choice award.

"The programme this year was full of extraordinary films and for the knowledgeable cinema audience to choose ours I will always be immensely proud."

The Special Presentation Prize, handed out by the International Federation of Film Critics, was awarded to Jonas Cuaron's Desierto, which is about a group of people attempting to cross the Mexican border.

It is the first full-length feature film from the son of Alfonso Cuaron, having shared writing credits on the Oscar-winning Gravity with his father.

The jury offered the award "for using pure cinema to create a strong physical sensation of being trapped in a vast space and hunted down by hatred in its most primal form".