La Bola Negra, the Spanish queer epic directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, won the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, cementing its position as a major Academy Awards contender ahead of its October release by Netflix.
The sweeping drama spans 85 years, beginning with the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and stretching through 2017.
Oscar Predictability and the Festival Circuit Path
TIFF’s top audience award carries a formidable track record as an Academy Awards barometer. Thirteen of the last 16 People’s Choice Award winners have secured Best Picture nominations at the Oscars, with four taking the ultimate prize, including The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book, and Nomadland. Since 2012, all but one winner of the People’s Choice Award has gone on to score a best-picture nomination at the Oscars. The lone exception was in 2024, when Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck
won the award. Last year’s winner, Hamnet, went on to earn eight Oscar nominations and a Best Actress win for Chloé Zhao’s film, earning filmmaker Chloé Zhao the distinction of becoming the first director to win the award twice since Nomadland won in 2020.
In the last five years, two of TIFF’s top three placers in each respective year made the Best Picture Oscar cut and all but one of them won at least one Oscar, though The Fabelmans went home empty-handed on Oscar night. Historical results include Belfast and The Power of the Dog in 2021, The Fabelmans and Women Talking in 2022, American Fiction and The Holdovers in 2023, Emilia Pérez and Anora in 2024, and Hamnet and Frankenstein in 2025.
La Bola Negra arrived in Toronto following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—collectively known as Los Javis—split the best director award with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland. Netflix acquired distribution rights out of Cannes and mounted a full awards campaign, pairing the festival run with an extended theatrical window.
“This is a deeply personal film but it also carries a message of the importance and necessity of expressing who you are. Knowing that audiences connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive.”
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, directors
Star-Studded Premieres and Collaborative Projects in Toronto
Cruz stars in a supporting role in the Spanish-language epic, whose title translates to The Black Ball. The film, set in 1932, 1937, and 2017, explores the interconnected lives of three gay men, and has been nominated for both the Palme d’Or and the Queer Palm. Penelope has praised La Bola Negra as a story centered on “humanity” and “empathy,” calling it a love letter to cinema, poetry, and art.
Cruz balanced promotional duties in Toronto for both La Bola Negra and Florian Zeller’s psychological thriller Bunker, which marks the ninth screen collaboration with husband Javier Bardem and is already receiving rave reviews. On Monday, Penelope showed why she’s the ultimate red carpet bombshell as she stunned in a sexy leather and lace dress at the premiere of her film Bunker during the Toronto International Film Festival, slipping into the figure-hugging strapless number complete with a daring thigh split for her moment in the spotlight while adding a smart black blazer, strappy black heels, matching white heels, and a gold necklace. In Bunker, Bardem portrays architect Miguel whose 17-year marriage comes under strain after he accepts a morally ambiguous project to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire played by Paul Dano, while Cruz’s character Sofia begins working with an American novelist named Jeremy Gray, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger.
Runners-Up and International Category Winners
In the main People’s Choice voting, Peter Farrelly’s comedy I Play Rocky—distributed by Amazon MGM and detailing Sylvester Stallone’s journey to get the Oscar-winning film Rocky made—finished as the first runner-up. Siân Heder’s disability rights drama Being Heumann, helmed by the Best Picture-winning CODA director and centered on disability rights pioneer and advocate Judy Heumann, took second runner-up honors and is distributed by Apple Original Films.
For the International People’s Choice Award, Simon Stone’s Elsinore took the top prize, and in a bit of symbiosis, Chariots of Fire won the TIFF People’s Choice Award back in 1981 then went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Elsinore is distributed by Focus Features and will be released in November. The film stars Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who performed Hamlet on stage in London at the end of his life while suffering from AIDS. Lee Chang-dong’s Korean drama Possible Love, focusing on the trauma of mass layoffs, placed as first runner-up in the international category, with Hur Jin-ho’s Korean procedural The Assassins taking second runner-up.
Additional audience awards went to Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been, a portrait of the 85-year-old vocalist, which won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award for documentary. The festival’s audience award for its Midnight Madness section went to Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a so-called gonzo documentary
by Matthew Rankin about the former Canadian prime minister. India’s Angh was the winner of the Platform prize as the 51st edition of TIFF drew to a close Sunday.
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