<\/p>\n
Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet picked up the top People\u2019s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition in the shadow of Venice and Cannes.<\/p>\n
The Nomadland director\u2019s adaptation of Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 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 and had a Canadian premiere in Toronto.<\/p>\n
More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n The first runner-up was Guillermo del Toro\u2019s Frankenstein, an adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel that was shot mostly in Toronto, while the second runner-up was Rian Johnson\u2019s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. <\/p>\n The win for Hamnet came as Hollywood\u2019s\u00a0awards<\/a>\u00a0season kicks into gear.\u00a0In 2024, Mike Flanagan\u2019s The Life of Chuck nabbed the top People\u2019s Choice honor, with Jacques Audiard\u2019s Emilia P\u00e9rez and Sean Baker\u2019s Anora in runner-up positions.<\/p>\n The audience award for best Midnight Madness title at TIFF went to Matt Johnson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the People\u2019s Choice award for best international film went to director Park Chan-wook\u2019s No Other Choice, with Joachim Trier\u2019s Sentimental Value, starring Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd and Renate Reinsve, as the first runner-up, followed by Neeraj Ghaywan\u2019s Homebound as second runner up.<\/p>\n And the People\u2019s Choice award for best documentary went to Barry Avrich\u2019s 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\u00a0You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, from director Nick Davis.<\/p>\n The People\u2019s Choice\u00a0awards 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0to an individual film they vote.<\/p>\n As in recent years, TIFF\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In juried prize-giving, To The Victory!, director Valentyn Vasyanovych\u2019s dark comedy about Ukraine\u2019s post-war future and who also plays the main character, won the Platform prize.<\/p>\n The FIPRESCI prize went to Spanish filmmaker Luc\u00eda Ale\u00f1ar Iglesias\u2019 Forastera, a directorial debut that stars Zoe Stein and Martina Garc\u00eda, 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.<\/p>\n The Canadian Discovery Award for emerging filmmakers went to\u00a0Sophy Romvari\u2019s Locarno prize winner Blue Heron, about eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocating to a new home on Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is very relevant to the society that we live in, and the world we live in, and to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine,\u201d Romvari told a Lightbox audience when accepting her award on Sunday.<\/p>\n And the best Canadian feature film prize picked by a TIFF jury went to Zacharias Kunuk\u2019s Inuk historical drama Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) after a North American premiere in Toronto.<\/p>\n The Short Cuts award for best international short film went to Joecar Hanna\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Patron dedicated her winning short to \u201call 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.\u201d<\/p>\n And the best Canadian short film went to The Girl Who Cried Pearls,\u00a0a 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\u2019s I Fear Blue Skies.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The muted informal sales market comes ahead of Toronto being set to launch an official content market, named The Market, in 2026.<\/p>\n Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet picked up the top People\u2019s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition in the shadow of Venice and Cannes. The Nomadland director\u2019s adaptation of Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel, a fictionalized account of Shakespeare and his wife as they fall in love, stars Paul Mescal as the Bard. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2021245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[103955,371513,37999,31190,343725,97631],"class_list":["post-2021244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-guillermo-del-toro","tag-nomadland-director","tag-paul-mescal","tag-the-hollywood-reporter","tag-tiff","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Chloe-Zhaos-\u2018Hamnet-Wins-Audience-Award.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2021244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2021244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2021245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2021244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2021244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2021244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}