Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, putting it on an enviable track to Academy Awards contention.
This is Zhao’s second win at TIFF, her first being in 2020 for Nomadland. She won best director and best picture the same year at the Oscars.
Starring Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as the playwright’s wife Agnes, the film follows the couple as they struggle with the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. It’s an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name.
Zhao directed and co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell.
Zhao wasn’t present to accept the award and made her acceptance speech via video link. “I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young,” she said. “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 People’s Choice category, created in 1978, has generally seen the winner land at least a best picture nomination at the Oscars, if not the award itself.
Last year’s winner, The Life of Chuck, had its release delayed to 2025 and might become an outlier in the category.
Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Sean Baker’s Anora were runners up and ended up with seven Oscars between them, including best picture, best director, and best actress.
This year, the runners up were Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
The audience award for international film, introduced this year, went to Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice.
In the festival’s Midnight Madness section, the audience prize went to Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The prize in the documentary category went to Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue.
In August, Zhao talked about working with Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, who produced Hamnet.
“Their feedback was very filmmaker-driven because they are both incredible filmmakers, so when they gave me notes, they were already infused with what they knew was my style,” she told Vanity Fair.
“Even when I did things that probably were confusing or didn’t make sense to people, they would say, ‘You know what? We trust her. Let her do her thing,’” she
Hamnet is set for a theatrical release on 27 November.
