La Bola Negra, the sweeping Spanish drama about the interconnected lives of three gay men across different generations, took home the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, giving the film another major boost as this year’s awards season begins to take shape.
Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, collectively known as “Los Javis,” the film stars Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close and Miguel Bernardeau and had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where Calvo and Ambrossi shared the Best Director prize with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland.
The directors were not on hand to accept TIFF’s top prize on the final day of the festival, with TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey explaining that the pair were back in Spain promoting the film. In a statement read by Bailey, however, Calvo and Ambrossi reflected on the deeply personal nature of the project and the response it received from Toronto audiences.
“This is a deeply personal film but it also carries a message of the importance and necessity of expressing who you are,” the directors said. “Knowing that audiences connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive.”
The People’s Choice Award was one of a dozen prizes handed out Sunday, bringing the 11-day festival to a close after 294 films screened across Toronto. Unlike many of the festival’s juried prizes, TIFF’s marquee award is determined by festivalgoers, and over the years it has also developed a reputation as an unusually reliable early indicator of which films will remain in the conversation through awards season.
Since 2012, all but one winner of TIFF’s People’s Choice Award has gone on to receive a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. Previous winners that ultimately took home the Best Picture Oscar include Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire, while other recent winners including Hamnet, American Fiction, The Fabelmans, Belfast, Jojo Rabbit and La La Land went on to earn Best Picture nominations.
That history makes La Bola Negra’s Toronto win particularly significant as the film begins the next stage of its awards campaign. Spain has already selected the film as its official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards, while Netflix, which acquired distribution rights following the film’s Cannes premiere, is mounting a wider awards push around the film.
La Bola Negra finished ahead of Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, which was named first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award, while Siân Heder’s Being Heumann took second runner-up.
Elsewhere among TIFF’s audience-voted prizes, Simon Stone’s Elsinore won the International People’s Choice Award, Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been took the Documentary People’s Choice Award, and Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney won the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award.
With major prizes from both Cannes and Toronto now behind it, La Bola Negra will next make its way to audiences outside the festival circuit. The film begins its theatrical run on October 16 before arriving on Netflix in Canada and the U.S. on December 2.
