La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s ambitious historical epic following the lives of three queer men intertwined in love and loss across three eras of time, won the People’s Choice Award at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, ensuring its trajectory as a key player in the 2027 Oscar race.

Past winners of the festival’s top prize, like Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Fiction (2023), and Hamnet (2025), have gone on to receive a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. People’s Choice winners like The King’s Speech (2010) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) went the distance to win Best Picture in their respective years. The only winner since 2012 that hasn’t received a subsequent Oscar nomination is Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck (2024). After winning People’s Choice in September 2024, Neon picked up the film and didn’t release it until the following June, missing the key Oscar window in fall 2024.

La Bola Negra, starring Álvaro Lafuente Calvo (professionally Guitarricadelafuente), Milo Quifes, Carlos González, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close, has garnered critical acclaim since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May. At that festival, the film’s directors, collectively known as Los Javis, won the best director prize in a tie with Paweł Pawlikowski (Fatherland). 

The TIFF premiere ended with a rapturous two-minute standing ovation. The film reimagines vignettes of the works of famed Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Often exploring repressed identity and sexuality, La Bola Negra draws largely from his last, unfinished work that featured an openly gay lead in the context of extreme societal oppression.

The film will be released in theaters by Netflix on October 16, followed by a wider release on November 6 before finally landing on the streaming platform on December 2. The unprecedented move is the longest theatrical exclusivity window in the company’s history, signaling a shift in strategy as Netflix pursues the Oscar gold that has eluded it since 2019, when Roma (2018) earned the dominant streaming entity its first Best Picture nomination.

Festival attendees vote for the People’s Choice Award. The runners-up were Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky (Amazon MGM Studios) and Sian Heder’s Being Heumann (Apple Original Films).

Simon Stone’s Elsinore won the International People’s Choice Award. The People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award went to Matthew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney. Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been won the prize in the documentary section.

Update Courtesy of Evan Miller

Feature Image Credit to Netflix