Indian film Angh has won the coveted Platform Prize at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival . The film, directed by Theja Rio, is set and rooted in Nagaland, and was lauded by the festival jury for its ‘deeply resonant portrait of a world’. Courtesy of its win, Angh has also now directly qualified for the Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards.
The jury’s statement for Angh read: “The Platform Prize goes to Angh. For its refreshing perspective, strength of filmmaking, and deeply resonant portrait of a world. We praise the filmmaker’s vision, audacity and courage.”
On Sunday evening, the festival’s organisers announced the prize winners, including Angh.
This means that Angh will be vying with other national entries, including India’s Gondhal, for a nomination in the Best International Feature Film category at the 2027 Oscars. Made by Naga filmmaker Theja Rio and adapted from his own award-winning 2021 short film, the film captures a culture rarely depicted on screen. La Bola Negra opens in theatres on 16 October and begins streaming on 2 December.
La Bola Negra, the Spanish queer epic about the intertwined lives of three gay men, won the People’s Choice Award, the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix acquired the film out of Cannes and has launched a full awards campaign for the film, giving it its longest theatrical release yet. Starting this year, TIFF’s Platform Prize is one of only six international festival awards with a direct pathway to the Oscars. Angh captures the haunting and intimate story of a father and son, the latter increasingly seduced by the comforts of the mission. Simultaneously, the film observes the process of conversion that reframes the local culture as primitive. The film, set in the 1960s, is almost entirely in Konyak. TIFF’s People’s Choice Award is the only major festival top prize voted on by viewers and not a jury. Over the years, it’s become known as one of the most iron-clad Academy Awards predictors. La Bola Negra is directed by the duo known as Los Javis — Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. It was already a hit at the Cannes Film Festival. The festival also awards a People’s Choice Award for international films. That went to Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who performed Hamlet in London while suffering from AIDS.
