Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans wins Toronto audience award

Toronto’s audience award, voted on by festival moviegoers, is a much-watched harbinger of the coming awards season. Each of the last ten years, the TIFF winner has gone on to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars — and often won it. Last year, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast triumphed at a much-diminished hybrid Toronto International Film Festival. The year before that, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland took TIFF’s award before winning at the Academy Awards. Other past winners include 12 Years a Slave, La La Land and Green Book.

This year, no film came into the festival more anticipated than The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s memory-infused film about his childhood. In the movie, which Universal Pictures will release Nov. 11, Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play the parents, with newcomer Gabriel LaBelle as teenage Spielberg, Sammy Fabelman. The film scored rave reviews after its premiere.

A still from Steven Spielberg’s film The Fabelmans.

“This is the most personal film I’ve made and the warm reception from everyone in Toronto made my first visit to TIFF so intimate and personal for me and my entire ‘Fabelman’ family,’” Spielberg said in a statement read by Cameron Bailey, festival director.

The first runner-up to the prize was Sarah Polley’s Woman Talking, about the female members of a Mennonite colony gathered to discuss years of sexual abuse. The second runner-up went to Johnson’s Glass Onion, the director’s whodunit sequel for Netflix.

Audience in other sections of the festival also vote for People’s Choice awards. The festival’s audience prize for documentary went to “Black Ice,” Hubert Davis’ film about the history of Black hockey players executive produced by LeBron James. The midnight section winner was “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” Eric Appel’s music biopic parody co-written with Yankovic and starring Daniel Radcliffe.

Wow, said Appel in a statement. “I never in a million years thought that our satire of traditional awards films would actually win an award, itself.”

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