The 13th Middleburg Film Festival concluded yesterday, and today it has announced the 2025 Audience Award winners. Chloe Zhao’s Shakespeare drama Hamnet, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, tied with the Closing Night film, Rental Family starring Brendan Fraser, for the Audience Award for Narrative Feature.
Winning the Audience Award for Documentary Feature was Academy Award winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s The Cycle of Love.
Academy Award nominated director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Audience Award for International Feature.
Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, Hamnet tells a powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
In Rental Family, Fraser stars as an American actor in Tokyo who struggles to find purpose until he lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese “rental family” agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers.
The Cycle of Love chronicles the story of PK Mahanandia, a 23-year old Delhi street artist who in 1977 set off on a 6000-mile cross-continent bicycle ride to find Lotta, the woman who had captured his heart on a visit to India. PK and Lotta, along with their adult children, shocked audiences by joining the film’s producer on stage post-screening.
Tunisia’s official selection for the Best International Feature Oscar, The Voice of Hind Rajab reconstructs the events surrounding the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in January 2024. Rajab came under fire as she and six members of her family tried to flee Gaza City.
Hamnet has been eyed as a likely Best Picture frontrunner for the next Academy Awards. Zhao’s earlier film Nomadland was also at Middleburg and went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. But there has been buzz building quietly for Rental Family and the performance by Fraser, following his Best Actor win in 2022 for The Whale, which also played at the festival that year.
“We’re thrilled to see how our slate of films connected so profoundly with our audiences,” said MFF Executive Director Susan Koch. “The humanity and emotional depth of these four films clearly struck a chord, reflecting the kind of bold, globally minded storytelling our festival strives to champion.”
For more of our coverage of the 2025 Middleburg Film Festival, go here.
