La Bola Negra wins TIFF People’s Choice Award

La Bola Negra, an epic film about the interconnected lives of three gay men in Spain, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. The prize was among a dozen awards handed out on the final day of the 11-day festival, which screened 294 films.

Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known together as Los Javis, were in Spain promoting the film and did not attend the ceremony. In a note read by TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, they said the film is about the importance of expressing who you are, and that audiences connecting with it and making it their own was the greatest gift they could receive.

Starring Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close and Miguel Bernardeau, La Bola Negra had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring. There, Calvo and Ambrossi shared the best director prize with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland. Bailey said TIFF’s 51st edition had been a resounding success, citing the strength and turnout of its audience.

Angh, directed by Theja Rio, won the $20,000 Platform Award. The film follows the last surviving chief of a Nagaland village on the Indo-Burma border. Rio said he wanted first and foremost to make a film about where he comes from and ensure its voices were heard.

This year, the Platform Award became one of six qualifying international festival prizes that can provide a route to Academy Awards consideration. Other eligibility requirements remain, including that at least half of a film be in a language other than English. Angh, which is mostly in Konyak, qualifies for best international feature consideration; Rio said his producers had reminded him that the Oscars remain a long way off.

Cody Lightning won Best Canadian Discovery, for a first- or second-time director, for his second feature Smudge the Blades. Accepting the award, he said his mother, also a filmmaker, had died several weeks earlier and dedicated the prize to her. Best Canadian Feature went to Serville Poblete’s coming-of-age film Sunburn, about children from Toronto’s Bleecker Street neighbourhood.

Other People’s Choice winners were Simon Stone’s Elsinore 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 documentary. It was Avrich’s second consecutive win in the documentary category, after last year’s surprise victory for The Road Between Us, about a retired Israeli general’s Oct. 7, 2023 rescue mission.

The FIPRESCI Prize for a first-time international filmmaker went to Irish writer-director David Turpin’s Ancestors, about an Irish man in London in the 1980s, when homosexuality remained illegal in Ireland. The NETPAC Award for films from Asia and the Pacific went to Hosam Abu Dan’s Palestinian film Thirteen in Gaza, about a 13-year-old girl living in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.