Director Barry Avrich speaks on stage after TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey presented him with the 2025 People’s Choice Documentary Award for The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue during TIFF’s awards ceremony in Toronto, on Sunday.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
A controversial documentary about a retired Israeli general’s rescue mission on Oct. 7 has won the People’s Choice Award for best documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, directed by Barry Avrich, drew competing pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests outside its single screening this week.
The film chronicles retired Israeli general Noam Tibon’s effort to rescue his family during the 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted.
Some pro-Palestinian demonstrators called the documentary “Israeli propaganda,” though they hadn’t seen it.
TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey says reversals around Oct. 7 documentary ‘caused a lot of pain’
Meanwhile, the general People’s Choice Award – long considered a bellwether for the Oscars – went to Hamnet, Chloe Zhao’s Shakespeare origin story starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.
The film, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, is about how grief, following the death of their son, Hamnet, may have inspired Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, Hamlet.
Jessie Buckley, left, and Paul Mescal in a scene from Hamnet. Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features via AP
The film, which Focus Features will release in theaters Nov. 27, is likely to return Zhao and her two stars to the Academy Awards. Zhao’s 2020 drama Nomadland won best picture and best director for Zhao. It, too, won the People’s Choice Award in Toronto.
Festival attendees vote for People’s Choice Award. The runners-up were a pair of Netflix releases: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
The audience award for international film went to Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. In the festival’s Midnight Madness section, the audience prize went to Matt Johnson Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.