The 13th Middleburg Film Festival has wrapped its 2025 edition, with Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and Brendan Fraser starrer Rental Family emerging as co-winners of the Audience Award for Narrative Feature.

The awards, announced today following the festival’s conclusion, add another notable audience endorsement to a pair of films already generating attention as the fall festival and awards-season calendar moves into high gear.

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, Hamnet stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley in Zhao’s dramatization of the personal tragedy and enduring love that helped inspire William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The film is increasingly being viewed as a potential major player in the upcoming Oscar race, including the Best Picture conversation. It was a beautifully well-done film. It felt like truly seeing Shakespeare before he became Shakespeare. Amazing performances by Mescal & Buckley. The cinematography alone is worth the price of admission

Middleburg has particular history with Zhao. Her previous feature, Nomadland, screened at the Virginia festival before going on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, adding an intriguing piece of awards-season precedent to Hamnet’s run.

Sharing the Narrative Feature prize was Rental Family, the Closing Night selection directed by Hikari. Fraser stars as an American actor living in Tokyo whose stalled career and search for purpose lead him to an unconventional job with a Japanese rental-family agency. He is hired to play stand-in relatives and companions for clients, forcing him to confront questions about identity, connection and what it means to belong.

The Middleburg recognition comes as Fraser continues to attract attention following his Best Actor Oscar win for The Whale in 2022, which also screened at the festival. While Rental Family may not yet have the same awards-season profile as Hamnet, the audience prize underscores the growing enthusiasm surrounding the film and Fraser’s performance.

The Audience Award for Documentary Feature went to Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel’s The Cycle of Love. The film chronicles the extraordinary journey of PK Mahanandia, a 23-year-old Delhi street artist who in 1977 embarked on a roughly 6,000-mile bicycle journey across continents to reunite with Lotta, the woman he fell in love with during her visit to India.

The real-life couple made an unexpected appearance following the screening. Mahanandia and Lotta, joined by their adult children, took the stage alongside the film’s producer, giving the Middleburg audience a memorable connection to the story they had just watched. This was one of the best documentaries I have seen all weekend!

Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab claimed the Audience Award for International Feature. Tunisia’s official submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, the film reconstructs the final hours of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in January 2024 after coming under fire while attempting to flee Gaza City with six members of her family.

With Hamnet and Rental Family sharing the top narrative prize, Middleburg’s audience awards offer an early snapshot of films and performances connecting with festivalgoers as the Oscar race begins to take shape. For Zhao and Hamnet, the victory further strengthens an already significant awards narrative; for Fraser and Rental Family, it provides another indication that the film could have a larger role to play as the season progresses.

Looking forward to next year’s already!

About The Author

Dean Rogers

Editor-in-Chief/Entertainment Reporter

I knew early on that I wanted to take my place among the stars. One day, my mother saw me reading The Washington Post at a very young age. Who would have known that it would be the building blocks of my journey? Since that day, I dedicated my life to learn all that is learnable. I read everything from encyclopedias to books to dictionaries to magazines. I’m also an avid television viewer, with my favorite genre being game shows. If you’ve seen me on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or Wheel of Fortune, then you know that this interest has served me well!

My unique style of reporting began back in junior high school, when I started to chronicle the events that shaped my life. Whether it was the annual family vacation or the local science fiction convention, I shot numerous pictures and recorded my thoughts so I could truly appreciate the history. During my senior year at Friendly High, I wrote what was to be my first masterpiece, “Advanced Space Academy – A One Week Journey.” I sent the eleven-page article back to the U.S. Space Camp staff. The article was highly praised for being “one of the best written articles in the history of U.S. Space Camp.” From then on, I knew what I wanted to do for rest of my life — to be a reporter.

Since then, I have trained in Broadcast Journalism at Bowie State University (2008) in Bowie, MD, earning a B.S. in Communications. I gained experience in news production and editing through field experiences with Bowie Community Media Corporation, Prince George’s Community Television, and Bowie State University Television. I also wrote scripts for a variety of quiz shows for over five years.

As a lifelong movie buff, I now see close to 100 films every year. I took this love of movies to the next step when I became a co-host for Eclipse Magazine TV in the fall of 2005. While at EMTV, I interviewed celebrities, worked on red carpets, and attended a wide variety of movie screenings. In January 2009, I took a leap of faith and started my own entertainment news magazine, The Rogers Revue. Shortly afterward, my lifelong journey of studying the silver screen and writing about what I learned finally earned me a place in the Washington Area Film Critics Association.

All of this has led me here, giving you the latest entertainment news for the DMV and the entire nation, and I am truly excited for whatever will come next.

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