Awards Explainer / Published 2026-10-26

Who Won the 2026 BFI London Film Festival Competitions?

The 70th BFI London Film Festival named four competition winners on October 18. The awards cover different kinds of work, from an archival feature about Soviet history to a short film about identity and fatherhood.

A conceptual four-panel film festival program with archival frames, temple shapes, documentary landscape and a short-film screen.
Conceptual editorial illustration; no panel represents an actual film frame.

THE SHORT VERSION

  • Imperium won the Official Competition’s Best Film Award; 9 Temples to Heaven won the Sutherland Award for First Feature.
  • Concrete Land received the Grierson Award for documentary, while Aman won the Short Film Award.
  • The four awards came from separate juries and categories, so the list is not a single ranking of every film shown at the festival.

Four prizes recognize four different kinds of film

On October 18, as the 70th BFI London Film Festival ended, the British Film Institute announced four main competition winners. Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium took Best Film in the Official Competition. Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven won the Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition. Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land received the Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition. Rahul Roye’s Aman won the Short Film Award. The BFI’s announcement describes each as a winner in its own competition, and says four separate juries selected the films. BFI’s winners announcement

That structure changes how to read the result. Imperium is the festival’s Best Film Award winner from the Official Competition, not a title that beat every film across all strands and formats. The other three awards recognize a first feature, a documentary and a short film. The Evening Standard’s independent report confirms the four results and separately identifies the juries that chose them. For readers scanning a headline list, the useful detail is the category beside each film: the award label explains which competition it won and what sort of work the jury was judging. The Standard

Imperium turns archival footage toward the early 1970s

Imperium, directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, won the Official Competition’s Best Film Award. The BFI describes it as a reconstruction of Soviet history through footage recorded by Italian cameramen who filmed life in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. That gives the film’s stated method a specific starting point: archival material made by visitors looking at a society from outside it. The jury’s citation praised the film’s wide archival perspective on everyday life before the Soviet Union broke apart. This is the BFI’s account of the film and the jury’s reasoning; it is not a substitute for seeing the film or an independent historical assessment of every image.

For a viewer deciding whether the title sounds familiar, the award label and premise may be more helpful than the general phrase “Best Film.” The subject is not presented as a conventional contemporary drama. The BFI puts archival reconstruction at the center, while the jury says the footage offers a perspective on society in the years before the Soviet Union dissolved. The official result does not tell us how the film arranges each archive sequence, what individual footage contains, or how much narration it uses. It gives the lens through which the jury selected it: a feature built from historical images and a particular period of Soviet life.

9 Temples to Heaven received the first-feature prize

The Sutherland Award went to 9 Temples to Heaven, Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s fiction debut. The BFI describes it as a passage through family, faith and life’s cycles, with gentle humor. Its jury framed the award around the director’s work as a first-time feature filmmaker and the film’s visual and spiritual approach. That makes the Sutherland category different from the main Best Film competition: it draws attention to a debut feature as a debut, rather than treating it only as one more title in a broad field. The BFI does not provide a commercial release date in its winners post.

This distinction matters when the results travel beyond the festival. A debut award can put the filmmaker’s next work on a reader’s radar, but the current result does not establish a theatrical distribution deal or an international streaming plan. It confirms a prize at this festival and summarizes the themes the BFI associates with the film. The programme had listed the film in the First Feature Competition before the ceremony; after the awards, the Sutherland label supplies its result. Readers looking for a screening outside the festival should wait for a distributor or venue announcement rather than assume that a festival prize comes with a release booking.

Concrete Land won for a family story shaped by displacement

Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land won the Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition. The BFI describes it as the director’s feature debut and an intimate, multigenerational portrait of a mixed-race family facing displacement and hostility in Jordan. The jury’s cited reasons emphasize how the film handles image, sound, scene construction and the relationship between the filmmaker and the people on camera. Those are documentary craft choices, not simply subject matter. The award therefore points readers toward both the family’s circumstances and the way the film builds trust with its subjects.

The description also separates the film from a news report about one event. The BFI presents it as a family portrait across generations, with cultural erasure and displacement as pressures in the story. The jury’s wording praises closeness to the characters and the film’s observational approach. None of that provides a full account of the family’s history or the film’s factual record, and the short award announcement is not a review. It gives a reliable orientation to the subject and the jury’s stated reasons without replacing the documentary itself.

Aman won the short-film award; three other films received mentions

Aman, directed by Rahul Roye, won the Short Film Award. The BFI’s synopsis follows a trans man who discovers he is pregnant on the eve of gender-affirming surgery, prompting a reckoning with identity, masculinity and fatherhood. The award page says the jury valued the film’s characters and visual storytelling, but the event’s result is the award itself, not a public consensus about the themes. The BFI also records three special mentions: Masc in First Feature, Queer Edward II in Documentary and Daughters of the Late Colonel in Short Film. These are separate from the four competition wins.

The BFI said Aman would be available free on BFI Player through October 25. That offer gives the short a specific viewing route during the immediate post-festival period, unlike the other winning titles in the announcement, for which the post does not provide a home-viewing schedule. The viewer should check the BFI Player page for current access and territory conditions. The film’s premise includes pregnancy and gender-affirming care, but the short award page gives no content advisory, runtime or medical context. Readers should use the official listing for the film’s confirmed synopsis rather than infer more from the award announcement.

The results sit inside a programme much wider than the competitions

The festival ran from October 7 through October 18. The BFI’s programme announcement counted 251 titles from 88 countries, including features, shorts, series and immersive works, as well as 33 world premieres. A curated selection and a Screen Talk were also planned across 10 partner venues in UK cities beyond London. The four competition awards therefore cover only part of the festival programme. A viewer interested in television, virtual reality, shorts or restored work would have encountered other kinds of programming that were not represented by the Best Film, Sutherland, Grierson and Short Film results. BFI’s 2026 programme announcement

The BFI listed three Audience Award categories alongside its juried competitions: Best Feature Film, Best Short and Best British Discovery. These are audience-voted categories, unlike the four awards decided by juries. The winners announcement dated October 18 said the audience results would follow, so that post should not be used as the current result for those separate prizes. This is another reason not to present the four competition winners as an all-festival popularity ranking. The juries assessed work within their own competition sections; audience awards ask a different group to choose favorites from what they saw.

Sources & reporting limits

  1. Competition winners announced at 70th BFI London Film Festival
  2. BFI London Film Festival announces 2026 award winners — The Standard
  3. Full programme announced for 70th BFI London Film Festival
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