arnewsteam
Here is the press release:
The 70th BFI London Film Festival closed on Sunday 18 October with the UK premiere of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, attended by the writer and director alongside the star of the film Julianne Moore. The Closing Night Gala took place at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall which returned as the festival’s Gala venue for a sixth time since its inaugural year in 2021.
BFI London Film Festival Director Kristy Matheson said: “It was joyful to witness a community come together over 12 days of screenings and events to celebrate our 70th birthday. Across the UK, audiences flocked to their local cinemas for LFF on Tour while London audiences enthusiastically embraced the programme, recording their highest ever levels of attendance.”
With public audiences at the heart of the LFF, festivalgoers were once again invited to vote in the BFI London Film Festival’s Audience Award for Best Feature Film and Audience Award for Best British Discovery. Following the vote, the genre-defying queer epic, La bola negra, directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, has been chosen as the Audience Award for Best Feature Film. Rooted in the legacy of beloved writer Federico García Lorca, this majestic and original film had it’s Gala screening on 8 October at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, introduced by directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo and stars Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau and Penélope Cruz.
Meanwhile, Grace Harper Brighouse’s Dependence has been voted the winner of the Audience Award for Best British Discovery. This intimate study of what it means to love an addict, which screened in the Grierson Competition for Best Documentary, follows the filmmaker as she sifts through decades of home movies following her father’s death. Dependence premiered at the Vue West End on 11 October, attended by director Grace Harper Brighouse and producer Alistair Payne-James.
The winners of this year’s BFI London Film Festival Awards were announced at the festival’s close on 18 October. They were chosen by juries presided over by Sam Pollard, (Official Competition), Amir El-Masry (First Feature Competition), Sandhya Suri (Documentary Competition) and Helen Simmons (Short Film Competition). The winners of the competitive awards were Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium (Best Film Award in Official Competition), Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven (Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition), Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land (Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition) and Rahul Roye’s Aman (Short Film Award in the Short Film Competition).
Audiences flocked to the festival’s buzzing cultural hubs – the South Bank where the Gala venue Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall sits alongside BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX; and London’s West End, where partner venues Vue West End, the Prince Charles Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Curzon Soho showed an array of titles from across the programme. 14 features screened at ten UK-wide partner cinemas in cities across the UK’s nations and regions; ten short film nominees were available digitally on BFI Player and an Industry Forum took place at Picturehouse Central, a busy hub for industry delegates.
The 70th edition welcomed more than 1000 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives and their teams to present their work at venues across the capital. The festival kicked off with the European Premiere of Simon Stone’s Elsinore, attended by cast members Andrew Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, David Dawson, Monica Dolan, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke and Sadie Soverall.
The festival featured an exciting range of 258 titles (comprising features, shorts, series and immersive works) hailing from 87 countries, and featured 249 languages with 43% of works from female filmmakers. All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 33 world premieres (11 features, 2 series, 19 shorts, 1 immersive), 16 international premieres (9 features, 7 short) and 20 European premieres (13 features, 7 shorts).
This year’s programme of Screen Talks featured in-depth interviews with some of the most exciting voices in cinema from both sides of the camera. The line-up included Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th, Origin); Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille); James Gray (We Own the Night, Ad Astra, Armageddon Time); Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, When You Finish Saving the World, A Real Pain); John Malkovich (Places in the Heart, In the Line of Fire, Being John Malkovich); Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Priscilla); Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, Nosferatu), Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers, Ripley, Pride); Cynthia Erivo (Harriet, Wicked, Widows); Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book, True Detective); Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Blink Twice, Mickey 17); and Javier Bardem (Jamón Jamón, No Country for Old Men, Cape Fear). The Screen Talk with director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later) took place at HOME in Manchester and all will be available to view exclusively online on BFI Player and YouTube.
LFF Expanded returned this year for its sixth edition, with nine projects spanning immersive art, virtual reality, AI and video gaming. This year’s Immersive Special Presentation was Water Body from acclaimed Hackney-based studio Marshmallow Laser Feast. Developed in collaboration with author Robert Macfarlane, it was staged at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a major new venue for the strand, and explored water as the connective tissue of life on our planet.
The VR Lounge at BFI Southbank presented two works reckoning with rising waters: Solwata, a mixed-reality documentary narrated by Mark Ruffalo that transported audiences to the Solomon Islands to meet the saltwater communities imperilled by climate change, and The World Came Flooding In, an XR journey created with flood-affected communities in Australia.
Making its installation premiere at BFI IMAX was Red the Ocean Around U, a dreamlike, AI-guided digital environment from studio CROSSLUCID and writer Orion Facey that evolved through the presence and decisions of every visitor, asking what happens when AI starts asking the questions. The ever-popular Games Lounge also returned to BFI IMAX with five standout international titles: TearyHand Studio’s …And Roger, an interactive visual novel exploring the experience of dementia; The Day I Became a Bird, a hand-drawn interactive story from Passion Pictures and Hyper Luminal Games; Unrelated Studio’s puzzle adventure Lofsöng; brlka’s gravity-shifting platformer Love Eternal; and Mixtape by Beethoven and Dinosaur, which follows three friends on one last adventure together, set to a soundtrack from artists including Roxy Music, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division.
LFF for Free once again offered a diverse programme of more than 50 events for audiences to attend completely free of charge, including illustrated talks, panel discussions, film screenings, DJ nights and family fun workshops. Highlights included a special collection of short films from the Displacement Film Fund (DFF), presented in person by founder Cate Blanchett and a selection of filmmakers with work in the programme; in conversation with award-winning screenwriter, playwright and novelist Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, House of Cards, Bleak House); actor, broadcaster and leading disability advocate Adam Pearson joined us to share his experiences and influential advocacy work in Zero Intention of Living Quietly; a discussion with acclaimed filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins on The Story of Documentary Film, looked back at a century of documentary filmmaking; Girls On Film Podcast – Live at LFF, returned to the festival featuring directors Carol Morley (7 Miles Out) and Olive Nwosu (Lady), director of photography Xenia Patricia, (Filipiñana) and executive producer of Queer Edward II, costumer designer Sandy Powell, with host Anna Smith; Dr Darren Gray discussed his book Horror and Disability: Representations of Disability in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television; there was a career conversation with pioneering writer, speaker and scholar Helen McCarthy to mark the release of her new book The Manga Bible; TV critic and broadcaster Scott Bryan looked back at the history and personal impact of queer representation in Out Now: A Queer Journey Through Modern Television; and the London Film Critics’ Circle shared the writing that inspired their careers in The Criticism That Made Me amongst many other exciting events.
The Surprise Film was Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, the true story of an unknown actor who believed he wasn’t meant to just write Rocky, but to play Rocky Balboa. Facing constant rejection, Sylvester Stallone risks everything, refusing to give up the lead role against impossible odds. The Surprise Film was introduced by Peter Farrelly.
Now in its ninth year, our annual BFI LFF Critics Mentorship Programme continued to look at how we can better serve writers from underrepresented communities. Devised to develop film writing skills through a schedule of sessions covering the first few days of the festival along with mentorship by industry media professionals, the programme is run by co-lead mentors Akua Gyamfi (founder, The British Blacklist) and Amon Warmann (contributing editor, Empire). 5 mentees took part in the 3-day group programme at the start of the festival, film critic Wendy Ide (Observer / Screen), features writer Emily Zemler (LA Times) and podcast host and broadcast commentator Leila Latif (Little White Lies – Truth & Movies) participated in special guest sessions with Q&As and the mentees got to interview actor/director Calvin Demba (The Animals, Supacell) and director Sarmad Khoosat (Lali/Joyland) as well as attending the Filmmaker Afternoon Teas. They were individually paired with Screen, Empire, Time Out, Sight and Sound and The Standard for 1-on-1 mentoring.
The festival partnered with BAFTA-winning charity MediCinema, to bring films from this year’s programme to their state-of-the-art cinemas in UK hospitals, to which patients can attend in their beds, wheelchairs, and with medical equipment. This unique charity operating at the heart of NHS hospitals offers a therapeutic cinema experience, improving the mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing of patients and their loved ones.
This year’s LFF Industry Forum events welcomed more than 3,200 delegates attending in-person panel discussions and a range of events creating valuable opportunities for creatives and industry professionals to meet and make new connections with UK and international colleagues seeking potential creative and business collaborations.
This year’s Industry Forum was headlined by ‘Spotlight’ discussions with two of the UK’s most successful producers Pippa Harris (The Beatles, Hamnet, 1917) and James Wilson (Naza, The Zone of Interest, You Were Never Really Here) where they discussed their careers, current projects and navigating the international film and TV market in a rapidly changing landscape. Puck brought its Stories of the Season to the BFI London Film Festival for the first time with Danny Boyle interviewed by Matt Belloni for The Town podcast; the pair delved into the state of the UK film industry, and Boyle’s latest film as director and producer, Ink.
Further in-person panels saw creatives, executives and industry experts offer timely insights into a range of topics including: the art and craft of costume design with costume designer PC Williams (We Are Lady Parts, The End We Start From) in conversation with British-Nigerian filmmaker and visual artist Akinola Davies Jr (My Father’s Shadow) in partnership with Variety; the intricacies of working on UK co-productions featuring a panel of international producers – Alan Maher (Everybody Digs Bill Evans), Adrià Monés (The End of It), Dyveke Bjørkly Graver (Fjord) and Rodrigo Teixeira (Paper Tiger); in collaboration with Sheffield DocFest and in partnership with The Hollywood Reporter, the process of working with archive while shaping a creative storyline was explored with directors Theo Rollason (Queer Edward II), Nanette Burstein (Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff), Rafael Guendelman (Az Zeeb) and the BFI National Archive’s Simon McCallum; the state of the UK’s cinema exhibition industry following a record-breaking spring-summer 2026 with cinema programmers Ben Lyndon (Curzon), Carol McKay (Picturehouse) and Madeleine Mullett (BFI IMAX) in partnership with Screen; new talent was also spotlit through an Emerging Writers in Conversation event with six on-the-rise screenwriters from across the UK – Travis Alabanza, Gemma Bedeau, Paul Carey, Alice Clark, Alex Mathias and Carly Mills.
In addition to the programme of in-person panel discussions, the LFF Industry Forum offered targeted networking events for professionals to meet and make new connections with UK and international colleagues seeking potential creative and business collaboration.
The fourth edition of New Waves co-production meetings saw a group of 12 experienced producers from France meeting UK producers to explore collaboration on new projects. The event was organised by the BFI and the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) in partnership with the Institut français in the UK and Unifrance. The day was preceded by an invitation-only networking reception hosted by Institut français UK to celebrate UK-France co-productions and to meet representatives from the CNC.
Supporting UK screen-based businesses and talent, and increasing opportunities for international collaboration, the 2026 Industry Forum featured a variety of talent development initiatives, as part of the UK Talent Days focus in partnership with the British Council. The UK Talent Days were also supported by the BFI Industry Supporters: Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, The Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Activity included the seventh edition of the Works-in-Progress showcase for new UK work; the BFI NETWORK@LFF programme for UK-based writers, directors and producers; and a new series of roundtable meetings between the writers of the “Fade In” panel and a selection of invited international and UK producers and the LFF Critics Mentorship Programme. An exclusive BFI Film Academy event also showcased how the organisation is evolving its flagship UK-wide training programme.
The annual Buyers and Sellers event returned to support the distribution strategies of films in the festival, offering a platform for international sales agents and UK distributors to meet and the 20th edition of the established two-day film financing event, the Film London Production Finance Market bought together UK and international producers and financiers.
Event partners supporting the LFF Industry Forum included Alliance for Women Film Composers, leading UK documentary organisations (BFI Doc Society, Documentary Film Council, Grierson Trust, Scottish Documentary Institute, Screen Scotland and Sheffield DocFest), FOCUS – The Meeting Place for International Production, Green Rider, Spotlight, ta.two, and Women in Film & Television.
The LFF Expanded Industry Day returned on 15 October at Picturehouse Central, bringing together the latest work in XR, gaming and immersive with a full programme of talks, showcases, funding surgeries and networking. At its heart was a Works-in-Progress showcase spotlighting boundary-pushing projects from artists including DARKFIELD, AΦE, Comfort Arthur, Humira Imtiaz and Keiken, alongside roundtables where teams shared insights into their creative process. Practitioners also gained rare, direct access to funders through one-to-one surgery sessions with the BFI Doc Society Fund, the BFI Filmmaking Fund and the BFI National Lottery Audience Projects Fund, while industry talks on designing venues for immersive experiences and building audiences for immersive work bookended the day.
The festival aims to be inclusive, accessible and welcoming, and alongside the major LFF for Free programme, there were a number of £10 tickets available to all London screenings and events, as well as £6 tickets for those aged 25 and Under. Young cinema goers and emerging professionals had the opportunity to enrich their experience with the festival through our Family screenings (with tickets priced at £6 for children and from £10 for adults). Audiences receiving Universal Credit, Pension Credit or Jobseekers allowance were able to book on-the-day tickets for £6 – subject to availability.
The 71st BFI London Film Festival will take place from Wednesday 6 October to 17 Sunday October 2027.
Comments
Loading…