The Spanish queer period drama La Bola Negra has won this year's people's choice award at the Toronto film festival, securing its place as the most popular audience film of the event.

The prize carries weight far beyond Toronto. The people's choice award has a strong record of predicting Oscar success, and each year industry watchers treat the Toronto audience vote as an early signal of which films will dominate the awards conversation through the winter. With this win, La Bola Negra enters that conversation at the front of the field.

The film spans three distinct time periods — 1932, 1937 and 2017 — and traces the lives of interconnected gay men across those eras of Spanish history. The structure allows the drama to move between decades, layering the experiences of its characters against the shifting social and political conditions that shaped them.

La Bola Negra arrived at Toronto with credentials already established on the Croisette. The film premiered earlier this year at the Cannes film festival, where it drew strong notices from critics. Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's chief film critic, awarded the film four stars in his review, praising it as "handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed."

That Cannes reception set the stage for Toronto, where the film now has an audience prize to add to its critical backing. The combination of a prestigious festival premiere and a popular award in Toronto positions La Bola Negra as a title to watch as the awards season gathers momentum.

The people's choice award is decided by festivalgoers rather than a jury, which gives the prize a particular resonance: it reflects what audiences actually responded to most strongly across the festival's programme. For a Spanish-language queer drama spanning nearly a century of history, topping that vote marks a significant popular endorsement.

How the film translates that festival momentum into the wider awards race will become clear in the months ahead, as La Bola Negra moves from the audience chambers of Toronto toward the full intensity of the Oscar season.