Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition that followed Venice, Telluride and Cannes.
The Nomadland director’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of Shakespeare and his wife as they fall in love, stars Paul Mescal as the Bard. The drama bowed in Telluride, where it garnered critical praise, especially for leading lady Jessie Buckley, and had a Canadian premiere in Toronto.
Zhao accepted the top audience prize at Toronto via a video link, and expressed gratitude and stressed the importance of making an audience connection with her work. “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 recalled in her acceptance speech.
Angie Han, a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, in her Telluride review of the Shakespeare-inspired drama wrote: “In Hamnet, the latest film from Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.”
The first runner-up for the top audience prize was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, an adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel that was shot mostly in and around Toronto, while the second runner-up was Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which had a world premiere at TIFF.
The win for Hamnet came as Hollywood’s awards season kicks into gear. In 2024, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck nabbed the top People’s Choice honor, with Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Sean Baker’s Anora in runner-up positions.
The audience award for best Midnight Madness title at TIFF went to Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The first runner-up is Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, and the second runner-up is The Furious, from director Kenji Tanigaki.
Elsewhere, the People’s Choice award for best international film went to director Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, the Grand Prix winner in Cannes that stars Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve, as the first runner-up, followed by Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound as the second runner up.
And the People’s Choice award for best documentary went to Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us, the Oct. 7, 2023-themed film that ignited controversy at TIFF when it was invited and then disinvited and finally reinstated by TIFF programmers. The first runner-up in the category is EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert by Baz Luhrmann, and the second runner-up is You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, from director Nick Davis.
The People’s Choice awards are voted on by TIFF attendees, and in all 14 audience and juried awards were handed out on Sunday morning in Toronto. To prevent festgoers voting more than once for the same film, TIFF matches email addresses to ticket-buyer information, and verifies vote origin against IP addresses.
While not voting for the same film more than once, TIFF patrons can vote for as many different films as they want, but have to have bought a ticket to an individual film they vote.
As in recent years, TIFF’s 2025 edition was overshadowed by Venice and Cannes, as Toronto hosted no official press conferences to help market films ahead of the awards season, and Toronto has no official film competition. As Hollywood contracts, celebrities made red carpet appearances in Toronto and took selfies with fans, but without the glitz and glamour as on the Croisette and the Lido.
In juried prize-giving, To The Victory!, director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s dark comedy about Ukraine’s post-war future and who also plays the main character, won the Platform prize.
The FIPRESCI prize went to Spanish filmmaker Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ Forastera, a directorial debut that stars Zoe Stein and Martina García, and the NETPAC award for the best Asian film by a first- or second-time feature director at TIFF went to Jitank Singh Gurjar for his second feature In Search of the Sky.
The Canadian Discovery Award for emerging filmmakers went to Sophy Romvari’s Locarno prize winner Blue Heron, about eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocating to a new home on Vancouver Island.
“This is very relevant to the society that we live in, and the world we live in, and to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Romvari told a Lightbox audience when accepting her award on Sunday.
And the best Canadian feature film prize picked by a TIFF jury went to Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuk historical drama Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) after a North American premiere in Toronto.
The Short Cuts award for best international short film went to Joecar Hanna’s Talk Me, executive produced by Spike Lee and which bowed in Cannes, while the best animated short was picked up by French director Agnes Patron for To The Woods, which had a North American premiere at TIFF.
Patron dedicated her winning short to “all the children in this world who see the sky darkening above their heads, filling their eyes and hearts with rage and fear instead of love and poetry.”
And the best Canadian short film went to The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a stop motion animated film from Oscar-nominated Canadian filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, with backing from the National Film Board of Canada, while the Vimeo Staff-Pick trophy went to Afghan filmmaker Salar Pashtoonyar’s I Fear Blue Skies.
On the film sales front, no major deals were unveiled in Toronto during the past 10 days as Toronto continues to be mostly a launchpad for movies, often feel-good and escapist fare destined for streaming platforms, and already with U.S. distribution.
The muted informal sales market comes ahead of Toronto being set to launch an official content market, named The Market, in 2026.
