Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition that followed Venice , Telluride and Cannes .

The Nomadland director’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of Shakespeare and his wife as they fall in love, stars Paul Mescal as the Bard. The drama bowed in Telluride, where it garnered critical praise, especially for leading lady Jessie Buckley, and had a Canadian premiere in Toronto.

Zhao accepted the top audience prize at Toronto via a video link, and expressed gratitude and stressed the importance of making an audience connection with her work. “I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young. And I wrote stories and I drew manga, and I put them on the Internet so that

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