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La Bola Negra has won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, confirming its status as a major Oscar contender.
The film, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, is an epic that spans the interconnected lives of three gay men in Spain. TIFF announced its suite of festival awards on Sunday.
TIFF’s top award is voted on by festivalgoers, and it’s become known as one of the most iron-clad Academy Awards predictors.
“This is a deeply personal film but it also carries a message of the importance and necessity of expressing who you are,” the directors said in a statement Sunday. “Knowing that audiences connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive.”
The film was already a hit at the Cannes Film Festival, where it split the best director award with Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland.
Netflix acquired La Bola Negra out of Cannes and has launched a full awards campaign. Netflix is also giving the film its longest theatrical release yet for the streamer. La Bola Negra opens in theaters Oct. 16 and begins streaming Dec. 2.
Angh takes jury prize
Other big winners include Angh, which nabbed the Platform Award, a jury prize that comes with a $20,000 purse.
The film from director Theja Rio is about the last surviving chief of a Nagaland village on the Indo-Burma border.
For the first time this year, the Platform Award offers a direct route to the best international feature film category at the Academy Awards.
The Academy previously only accepted one submission from each country for that category, but this year it expanded its criteria to consider winners of qualifying awards at international film festivals.
The Platform Award is one of six such prizes, but other eligibility criteria still apply, including that at least half of the film must be in a language other than English.
Because Angh is mostly in Konyak, it qualifies for best international feature contention.
Canadian filmmakers honoured
Best Canadian Discovery for a first- or second-time director went to Cody Lightning for his sophomore feature Smudge the Blades.
“I come to you today with a heavy heart and beer on my breath,” Lightning said as he accepted the award, saying his mother — also a filmmaker — died several weeks ago.
“I get my humour from my dad, I get my storytelling from my mom,” he said through tears. “This one’s for my mom. This one’s for my mom. This one’s for my mom.”
Best Canadian Feature went to Sunburn by Serville Poblete, a coming-of-age film about a group of kids from Toronto’s Bleecker Street.
Rounding out the other People’s Choice winners are Elsinore by Simon Stone for international People’s Choice; Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney for Midnight Madness; and Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been for People’s Choice documentary.
This is the second-straight year Avrich has won that prize. Last year he was the surprise winner for The Road Between Us, a documentary about an Israeli general’s rescue mission on Oct. 7, 2023.
What happens when a filmmaker makes a movie about the neighbourhood where he grew up? Sunburn, set on one of the hottest days of the year in Toronto’s St. James Town, makes its world premiere tonight at TIFF. CBC’s Haydn Watters travelled to Bleecker Street to chat with the director and cast.
The FIPRESCI Prize, which goes to a first-time international filmmaker, was awarded to Ancestors by Irish writer-director David Turpin, about an Irishman in London in the 1980s, when homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland.
The NETPAC Award, which recognizes movies from Asia and the Pacific, went to the Palestinian film Thirteen in Gaza by Hosam Abu Dan, about a 13-year-old girl living in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
