La Bola Negra wins Toronto movie competition individuals’s alternative award | Toronto movie competition 2026

Spanish queer drama La Bola Negra has received this 12 months’s individuals’s alternative award on the Toronto film festival.

The movie, which takes place in 1932, 1937 and 2017, focuses on the lives of interconnected homosexual males. It premiered at this 12 months’s Cannes movie competition with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it “handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed” in a four-star overview.

After a aggressive bidding battle after its premiere in May, Netflix picked up the rights and the movie will probably be launched later this 12 months.

In a ready assertion, administrators Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi mentioned that connecting with Toronto audiences on this method was “the best present we may obtain”.

It marks the primary overseas language winner of the award since 2011’s Lebanese drama Where Do We Go Now?

The award has come for use as a predictor of Oscar success with previous greatest image winners similar to Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, Nomadland, Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech all selecting it up. Last year’s winner was Chloé Zhao’s Shakespeare drama Hamnet which was nominated for eight Oscars, profitable one for greatest actress Jessie Buckley.

Sylvester Stallone biopic I Play Rocky and incapacity activism drama Being Heumann had been named this 12 months’s runners-up.

For the second 12 months, the transnational individuals’s alternative award was additionally handed out with British 80s-set Aids drama Elsinore named because the 2026 winner. Last 12 months’s was given to Park Chan-wook’s darkly comedic thriller No Other Choice.

The Toronto winners come after May el-Toukhy’s suspense drama Woman Unknown won the Golden Lion award on the Venice movie competition. At Cannes again in May, Cristian Mungiu’s household drama Fjord won the Palme d’Or.