Spanish drama La Bola Negra wins Toronto film festival's people's choice award

Spanish queer drama La Bola Negra has taken home this year's people's choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows the interconnected lives of gay men across three time periods: 1932, 1937 and 2017.

The film premiered at this year's Cannes film festival, where the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it a four-star review, describing it as handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed. Following a competitive bidding war after its May premiere, Netflix acquired the distribution rights and plans to release the film later this year.

Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi said in a prepared statement that connecting with Toronto audiences in this way was the greatest gift they could receive.

First foreign-language winner since 2011

The win makes La Bola Negra the first foreign-language film to take the award since Lebanese drama Where Do We Go Now? in 2011. The Toronto people's choice award has increasingly become viewed as a predictor of Oscar success, with past winners including eventual best picture recipients Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, Nomadland, Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech. Last year's winner, Chloé Zhao's Shakespeare-themed drama Hamnet, went on to earn eight Oscar nominations and won best actress for Jessie Buckley.

This year's runners-up were the Sylvester Stallone biopic I Play Rocky and disability activism drama Being Heumann.

For the second year running, the festival also handed out an international people's choice award, which went to British 1980s-set Aids drama Elsinore. Last year's international prize was awarded to Park Chan-wook's dark comedy thriller No Other Choice.

The Toronto results follow other major festival wins this year: May el-Toukhy's suspense drama Woman Unknown took the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, while Cristian Mungiu's family drama Fjord won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May.