TORONTO — A three-hour, three-timeline Spanish epic about buried queer history beat out a Sylvester Stallone biopic and a drama about a disability-rights pioneer to win the Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award, instantly becoming one of the season's leading Oscar contenders.
"La Bola Negra," directed by the filmmaking duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — known in Spain as Los Javis — was named winner of TIFF's audience prize on September 20, the festival's closing weekend. The film beat more than 200 features that screened over 11 days, with runner-up honors going to Peter Farrelly's "I Play Rocky" and Siân Heder's "Being Heumann," according to AwardsWatch's rundown of the full winners list.
Neither director was in Toronto to collect the prize; both were in Spain promoting the film's domestic rollout. In their absence, TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey read a statement on their behalf. "This is a deeply personal film, but it also carries a message about the importance and the necessity of expressing who you are," the directors said, according to a report from CP24. "So knowing that audiences have connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive."
An 85-year span, three intertwined stories
"La Bola Negra" moves across 85 years of Spanish history, from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s through 2017, braiding together three narratives: closeted gay soldiers fighting under Francisco Franco, the search for a lost final work by the poet Federico García Lorca, and a present-day researcher piecing together suppressed LGBTQ+ history. The cast includes Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close and the Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente. Netflix, which is distributing the film, has set a theatrical release for October 16 ahead of a December streaming premiere.
The film arrived in Toronto already trailing awards heat. It shared the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year with Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland," and its TIFF win makes it the first non-English-language film to take the festival's top audience honor since the Lebanese comedy "Where Do We Go Now?" in 2011, a gap of 15 years.
A reliable pulse-check on Oscar season
TIFF's People's Choice Award has functioned for decades as an early and unusually accurate gauge of Academy Awards momentum. Past winners that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar include "Slumdog Millionaire," "12 Years a Slave," "Green Book" and "Nomadland," while other recipients such as "La La Land," "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" and "The Imitation Game" landed Best Picture nominations without winning, according to the award's history compiled on Wikipedia's list of past honorees. That track record is why the prize is often described inside the industry as the unofficial start of Oscar campaign season, well before nominations voting even opens.
This year's runners-up carry their own awards-season pedigree. "I Play Rocky," Farrelly's biopic tracing Sylvester Stallone's path to writing and starring in "Rocky," took second place with Amazon MGM behind it, while "Being Heumann," Heder's film about disability-rights advocate Judy Heumann, placed third with Apple Original Films as distributor. In the festival's international competition, "Elsinore," Simon Stone's drama starring Andrew Scott as an actor performing Hamlet while dying of AIDS, won the International People's Choice Award ahead of new films from Lee Chang-dong and Hur Jin-ho; Focus Features has set a November release for that title.
Distributors will now begin shaping fall marketing campaigns around the win. For Netflix, long eager for a definitive Best Picture contender to anchor its awards push, a subtitled historical epic winning over English-language biopics from two rival studios' slates is a notable early data point — one the streamer is likely to lean on heavily as guild and critics' groups begin issuing their own year-end honors in the coming weeks.
