La Bola Negra, a Spanish-language drama focusing on interconnected gay men across three time periods, has been awarded the people’s choice award at this year’s Toronto film festival. The film spans 1932, 1937, and 2017 in its narrative structure. It initially premiered at Cannes in May, where critics including the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw praised its production quality and construction in a four-star review.
Following its Cannes premiere, Netflix secured distribution rights to the film following a competitive bidding process. The film is scheduled for release later this year through the streaming platform. Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi commented in a statement that receiving recognition from Toronto audiences represented an exceptional achievement for the project.
The Toronto people’s choice award carries significant industry weight as a potential predictor of Academy Awards success. Several Best Picture Oscar winners have previously claimed this award, including Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, Nomadlaw, Slumdog Millionaire, and The King’s Speech. Chloé Zhao’s Shakespeare drama Hamnet won the award in the prior year and subsequently received eight Oscar nominations, with Jessie Buckley earning a win for best actress.
The film marks the first foreign language winner of the award since 2011’s Lebanese film Where Do We Go Now?. The runners-up selections this year included the Sylvester Stallone biopic I Play Rocky and the disability activism drama Being Heumann. The festival also awarded an international people’s choice award for the second consecutive year, with the British AIDS drama Elsinore receiving that honor. This year’s major film festival season also saw May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown win the Golden Lion at Venice and Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord claiming the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May.
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