The Toronto International Film Festival has come a long way in the last 50 years -- from the time it was known as the Festival of Festivals to becoming the biggest film event of North America and the bellwether of the fall award season.
The festival's People's Choice Award, voted by the audience, is a strong indication of films that can eventually be nominated and even win Oscars. Twelve of the last 15 People's Choice winners have received Best Picture Oscar nominations.
This year should be no different.
Chloe Zhao's film Hamnet won the People's Choice Award and is expected to perform well when the Oscar nominations are announced on January 22, 2026.
But there was so much more at this year's TIFF, including 17 films from India, South Asia and the Diaspora.
Two Indian films received jury recognitions at the awards event. Jitank Singh Gurjar's Vimukt (In Search of the Sky) won the NETPAC award given to the best Asian films while Neeraj Ghaywan's Homebound was the second runner-up for the International People Choice Award. It had premiered in Cannes and opens in India on September 26.
Aseem Chhabra watched 38 films at the 11-day festival.
He lists his Top 10 favourites, ranked. The list includes only includes films that premiered in Toronto and other fall festivals, like the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals.
10. Vimukt (India)
Winner of the NETPAC award, Vimukt (In Search of the Sky) is a small indie film set in the rural parts of Madhya Pradesh and the recently concluded Maha Kumbh Mela.
A beautifully shot, moving film in Braj Bhasaha, Vimukt narrates the story of a poor couple in a village who have a mentally challenged adult son.
After years of struggle, they take their son to the Maha Kumbh Mela hoping for a miracle.
Jitank Singh Gurjar's debut directorial is a miracle of a film. It was made in a short period of time, which included 11 days of shoot and now it is a TIFF winner.
9. Rental Family (Japan/US)
Japanese director Hikari works with Oscar winner Brendan Fraser in this charming, poignant film, where an American actor living in Tokyo gets hired to play surrogate roles in people's lives.
Japan has a culture where people hire actors to play their friends or companions to ease their loneliness.
Fraser's Philip Vandarpleog has been working as an actor in Tokyo for seven years, when he is hired to play the role of a sad American at a funeral.
Next, he is hired to marry a woman who wants a marriage of convenience, so she can stay with her lesbian lover.
Then he is even asked to play the missing father of a young half-Japanese, half-American girl.
It all seems fun, but then Vandarpleog starts to get involved in his hired families' lives and begins to suffer from an imposter syndrome.
Rental Family is a crowd-pleasing film and gives Fraser a chance to prove that he is a talented actor, and not just a one-Oscar wonder.
8. Ky Nam Inn (Vietnam)
Vietnamese-American director Leon Le's Ky Nam Inn is set in post-war Saigon, later named as Ho Chi Minh City. The country has just been reunited under the communist rule and people start getting used to their normal lives.
A young man named Khang arrives in the city and is hired to work on a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, Le Petit Prince.
Through a connection, he rents a room in a crowded tenement where nosey neighbors meddle in each other's businesses.
Khang meets Ky Nam, an older widow, who makes a living cooking meals for her neighbours.
Khang and Ky Nam are drawn to each other. But this is not a Hollywood film, so there is no loud expressive love and sex between the two characters.
Instead, our two protagonists, much like the leads in Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece In the Mood for Love, maintain a quiet, subtle relationship, cooking food together and going out for long walks. And they barely kiss once.
Ky Nam Inn is a gentle, sweet, tender romance, a rare window into the lives of Vietnamese people, who maintain smiles despite the brutal war they have endured and their ongoing harsh realities.
7. Frankenstein (US/Mexico)
Guillermo Del Toro's craft has always been spectacular.
This is a film that the three-times Oscar winner has been wanting to make for over 30 years and finally, he has created his magnum opus budgeted at $120 million, and at a scale staggering even by his own standards.
Oscar Issac plays the brilliant, egotistical scientist Victor Frankenstein who creates a creature whose body has been assembled from the corpses of dead men.
Young Australian sex symbol Jacob Elordi is almost unrecognisable (except for his height) as the creature who is desperate for the love of his father.
Some critics were not thrilled about Del Toro's take of Mary Shelley's 1818 sci-fi book but TIFF audiences loved the film, giving it the number two slot for the People's Choice Award.
After a brief theatrical run next month, Frankenstein will drop on Netflix on November 7.
6. Gandhi (India)
In the sweeping project which will take up three seasons, director Hansal Mehta and producer Sameer Nair have gone beyond Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and Shyam Benegal's The Making of the Mahatma.
Their Gandhi -- based on two books by Ramachandra Guha -- focuses on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the human being we rarely get to know in our politically-charged environment.
Brilliantly acted by Pratik Gandhi with an exceptional supporting cast, this series is handsomely staged and should be seen by all when it streams next year.
5. No Other Choice (South Korea)
Winner of this year's newly established International People Choice Award, Korean master Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice is a hilarious and at times shocking satire, adapted from Donald Westlake's novel, The Ax.
Man-soo (Korean superstar Lee Byung Hun) has worked for 25 years at a paper factory where he was awarded the Pulp Man of the Year. Then, he is suddenly laid off.
When mortgage payments add up and his house is put on sale, Man-soo hatches a plot to find himself another job. But first, he must eliminate the potential competition that he could face in his job-hunting process.
No Other Choice is a reminder that having worked for 25 years -- from the time of his classic DMZ-based thriller Joint Security Area, through the years he made his Vengeance trilogy (including Oldboy) and even his recent series The Sympathizer, Chan-wook remains one of the greatest filmmakers of our times.
4. Calle Malaga (France/Spain/Morocco)
In the follow-up to her gay romance Blue Caftan, Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzami casts Carmen Maura (Pedro Almodovar's favorite actress until the two had a falling out) as Maria, an elderly Spanish woman living in an old neighbourhood in Tangiers. She loves her life centered around her apartment.
Unfortunately, her late husband willed the apartment to their daughter.
Maria's life nearly shatters when her daughter Clara arrives from Madrid and announces she has to sell the apartment.
Clara, with her good intentions, sends her mother to an old people's home.
But Maria is feisty and despite the odds stacked up against her, she manages to reclaim her life in this thoroughly likeable film.
3. The Testament of Ann Lee (UK/US)
A year after they gave us their critically acclaimed The Brutalist, the couple Mona Fastvold and Brady Cobert have come up with another masterpiece, The Testament of Ann Lee.
They wrote both the films. Cobert directed The Brutalist, while Fastvold helmed Ann Lee.
Ann Lee (played by Amanda Seyfried) was a preacher from Manchester who became the founder of the Shakers movement in the 18th century.
Her followers believed her to be the female incarnation of Jesus Christ and followed her on a ship all the way to New England. The Shakers believed in celibacy, communal living and were pacifists.
Ann Lee is a rousing film, packed with religious songs, and energised dance.
It's a breathtaking musical.
2. The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia)
In this intense, often harrowing film Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania narrates a true story, a day and night in the life of a six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza, trapped in a family car which is being attacked by Israeli tanks and snipers.
Hania uses actual voice recordings of the little girl as she pleads with the Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers to come and rescue her.
The film rests on Hind Rajab's spirit and that of the volunteers who desperately try to keep the little girl calm.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Hania's film is a powerful human document that brings home the urgency of ending the two-year-long war in Gaza.
1. Hamnet (UK/ US)
Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is her finest film to date. It takes us through William Shakespeare's life, his love, marriage to Agnes, family life and a devastating tragedy, which eventually inspires him to write his best-known play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel, the film stars Paul Mescal playing Shakespeare and Jesse Buckley as his wife Agnes.
Both actors are outstanding and will be considered for next year's best acting Oscar nominations.
But the film belongs to Buckley, who carries the family's burden and tragedy on her face.
Winner of this year's People Choice Award, Hamnet will is already being considered as a front runner for the Oscar race.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
© 2026