La Bola Negra wins TIFF People's Choice Award, cementing Oscar frontrunner status

Since 2008, when Slumdog Millionaire won the Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, the prize has become one of the most reliable bellwethers of Academy sentiment. Sixteen of the last 18 winners have earned Best Picture nominations, and five have taken the top prize. On Sunday, the 51st edition of TIFF added a new title to that lineage: La Bola Negra, the Spanish queer epic directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known collectively as Los Javis.

The film, which recounts the intertwined lives of three gay men across different eras in Spain, won the festival's top audience award at a ceremony capping an 11-day event that screened 294 films from 70 countries. Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky was the first runner-up, and Sian Heder's Being Heumann placed third. The win marks the first time a non-English-language film has taken the People's Choice Award since Where Do We Go Now? in 2011, according to The Wrap.

La Bola Negra has been building momentum since its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Los Javis won the best director prize in a tie with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland. Netflix acquired the film out of Cannes for an awards season push and will give it a 47-day exclusive theatrical release starting October 16 before it debuts on the service on December 2, Screen Daily reported. The film was also selected as Spain's official Oscar submission earlier in the week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In a statement read by TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, the directors said the film carries a message about the importance of expressing who you are. "So, knowing that audiences have connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive," they said. Bailey noted the directors were in Spain to promote the film and could not attend the ceremony in person.

The People's Choice Award is voted on by festival attendees, who submit their preferences online. TIFF matches email addresses to ticket-buyer information and verifies vote origins against IP addresses to prevent multiple votes from the same person. Other winners announced Sunday included Theja Rio's Angh, which took the Platform Prize and its $20,000 CAD purse, and Simon Stone's Elsinore, which won the International People's Choice Award.

Industry observers noted that while the People's Choice Award has not always translated to Oscar success, the Toronto audience is considered a close demographic match to the Academy. The Hollywood Reporter's awards editor wrote that La Bola Negra has emerged as "perhaps the principal challenger to The Odyssey" in the Best Picture race, citing the film's low budget relative to Universal's $250 million production. The film stars Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, and Miguel Bernardeau, according to The Canadian Press.

The win caps a remarkable week for the film, which also earned one of the festival's longest-standing ovations on record during its Canadian premiere. With Spain's official submission secured and Netflix's theatrical campaign ahead, La Bola Negra enters the fall season with a clear path toward the Academy Awards.