Elsinore and La Bola Negra have landed awards at the Hamptons Film Festival, adding to their growing momentum ahead of the Oscars. The festival wrapped its 34th edition on October 11 after screening over 200 films across 140+ features and shorts. Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone and starring Andrew Scott, took home the International People’s Choice Award — its second major win after Toronto’s audience prize. The film, a biopic about actor Ian Charleson’s final performance as Hamlet during the AIDS crisis, drew strong reactions in East Hampton, where it premiered. Meanwhile, Spain’s Oscar hopeful La Bola Negra, co-directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, was named Best Narrative Feature by festivalgoers. It had already made waves at TIFF with an audience award, a signal often seen as a bellwether for Academy attention. The narrative jury praised it as a ‘triptych of queer desire, queer memory and queer resistance’ that uses revisionist history to deliver an emotional punch. Special mentions went to Mads Mengel’s The Guest. On the documentary side, If Pigeons Turned to Gold won Best Documentary Feature for its raw, inventive take on family addiction. Naza, a controversial portrait of Israeli military actions in Palestine, received the Victor Rabinowitz & Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice. Burgundy, a documentary by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, claimed the Documentary Audience Award. Other honours included the Junior Jury Award to Mouse, the Artemis Rising Foundation’s Raise the Vibration Award to The Drug in Our Pocket and A Song for the Snow Lion, and the Sherzum Award to What Will I Become? And Welcome to Paris for LGBTQ+ storytelling. The Choice picked up the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for Films of Conflict & Resolution. Ben’Imana and The Drug in Our Pocket also won top prizes at the New York Women in Film & Television awards. The next stop for these films? The fall festival circuit, and possibly the Oscars.