La Bola Negra wins Toronto’s audience vote and rewrites the Oscar map for Netflix

Toronto’s audience did the thing the whole industry watches it for: it named a front-runner. The People’s Choice Award went to La Bola Negra, the sprawling Spanish-language film from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the directing pair known at home as Los Javis, and with it the festival handed the autumn its clearest signal yet. The award has previewed the eventual Best Picture nominee, and often the winner, for more than a decade, and this year it landed on a subtitled film distributed by a streamer — a combination the Academy has spent years insisting it was ready to embrace and rarely has.

La Bola Negra is the first non-English-language film to top the audience vote since Where Do We Go Now? in 2011, and the first Netflix release to win it outright. Peter Farrelly’s boxing drama I Play Rocky finished first runner-up and Sian Heder’s Being Heumann second, a podium that ran from a crowd-pleasing sports picture to a disability-rights portrait to a queer epic in Spanish — and the crowd chose the hardest sell of the three.

The film arrived in Toronto already carrying weight. It shared the Best Director prize at Cannes in May, and Netflix, which acquired it out of that festival, has built a full awards campaign around a cast that pairs the Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. Inspired by an unfinished Federico García Lorca play and adapted with the playwright Alberto Conejero, it follows three generations of queer men bound across time by love and loss. Netflix opens it in theaters on October 16 before it begins streaming, the kind of theatrical runway the company reserves for a title it intends to run all the way to the Dolby.

The documentary audience award, another reliable Oscar tell, went to Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been, Barry Avrich’s portrait of the singer whose voice powered records credited to other people for decades. It beat James Marcus Haney’s Black Sunflowers and Mila Aung-Thwin’s The Ultra Runner. At 85, Love finally has a film that is entirely hers — a correction to 20 Feet From Stardom, the 2013 Oscar winner that made her a supporting player in the story of her own life.

The Midnight Madness audience, the festival’s most reliably rowdy voting bloc, did something out of character: it crowned a documentary about a former prime minister. Matthew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a collage fever-dream assembled from decades of Canadian television, won a section built for horror and genre mayhem, beating Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral and Sabu’s Arrested Memory. That a gonzo political essay could out-poll two genre films says as much about Rankin’s showmanship as about the room.

The juried Platform Prize produced the festival’s most consequential first. Theja Rio’s Angh, a debut feature shot on 16mm in the jungles of Nagaland near the Indo-Burma border, took the award from a jury led by Pablo Trapero, which praised its “refreshing perspectives, strength of filmmaking, and deeply resonant portrait of a world.” The timing matters: TIFF made the Platform winner directly eligible for the Best International Feature Oscar this year, so a Naga-language film from India’s northeast now carries a festival’s endorsement straight into that race.

The rest of the sheet spread the wealth. The FIPRESCI critics’ prize went to David Turpin’s Ancestors, and the NETPAC award to Thirteen in Gaza. On the Canadian side, Sunburn, a coming-of-age comedy from Serville Poblete, took Best Canadian Feature, with Cody Lightning’s Smudge the Blades named Best Canadian Discovery.

What changes now is the shape of the season. Toronto does not hand out a Palme or a Lion; it hands out a read on what audiences will actually turn out for, and this year that read points at a Spanish-language film on a streaming service, a legacy music documentary, and a debut from a filmmaking tradition the Oscars have never once recognized. If the Academy is serious about the world it keeps saying it wants to reflect, Toronto just handed it the cast list.

Tags: recap, Toronto Film Festival, Los Javis, La Bola Negra, Angh, Darlene Love