The Toronto International Film Festival has concluded its nearly two-week run, and the festival’s highly anticipated People’s Choice Award has been given to Chloé Zhao’s latest film, Hamnet. The victory makes Zhao the first filmmaker to win the top audience prize twice at the festival, having previously won in 2020 for her Oscar-winning film, Nomadland.
The People’s Choice Award has a history of predicting future awards season success. Twelve of the last fifteen winners went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, with four of them taking home the award. This year, the prize went to Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, as they mourn the death of their young son. The film stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.
Zhao accepted the award via a video link and offered a personal reflection on the significance of making an audience connection. “I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young. And I wrote stories and I drew manga, and I put them on the Internet so that I could read the comments and the reactions of strangers. Whether they liked them or not, I felt connected to them, and suddenly the world is a little less of a lonely place and life seems to have more meaning,” the director said in her acceptance speech.
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The film, which premiered at the Telluride film festival to positive reviews, was praised by The Hollywood Reporter film critic Angie Han for how Zhao “harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.” Han’s review also highlighted the film’s ability to seamlessly blend joy and fear, love and loss, adding, “One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable.”
The festival’s two runners-up for the top audience prize were Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
New Awards and Diverse Winners
For the first time, TIFF presented an International People’s Choice Award, which was won by Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, a darkly comedic thriller. The documentary prize was given to Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us, a controversial film about the aftermath of 7 October 2023.
TIFF awards are chosen by audience members who purchase a ticket for a film and vote for it online. The festival has measures in place to prevent attendees from voting more than once for the same film. In all, 14 audience and juried awards were handed out on Sunday morning, concluding a festival that, despite being overshadowed by Venice and Cannes, still served as an important launchpad for a number of upcoming films.
