Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium has won Best Film at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. The other competition winners are 9 Temples to Heaven, Concrete Land, and Aman. Together, they offer an intriguing watchlist for viewers interested in history, family, belonging, and the complicated relationship between personal experience and public identity.
The complete 2026 competition awards list
- Best Film, Official Competition: Imperium — director Sergei Loznitsa.
- Sutherland Award, First Feature Competition: 9 Temples to Heaven — director Sompot Chidgasornpongse.
- Grierson Award, Documentary Competition: Concrete Land — director Asmahan Bkerat.
- Short Film Award: Aman — director Rahul Roye.
Special mentions
- First Feature Competition: Masc — director Bertil Nilsson.
- Documentary Competition: Queer Edward II — director Theo Rollason.
- Short Film Competition: Daughters of the Late Colonel — director Elizabeth Hobbs.
The BFI announced these results on October 18. The audience awards are separate: voting closes October 21, with Best Feature Film and Best British Discovery results to follow. Special mentions also remain distinct from category wins. [BFI competition awards announcement](https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/news/competition-winners-announced-70th-bfi-london-film-festival).
Imperium: history seen through the people inside it
Loznitsa’s film draws on footage shot by Italian cameramen in the Soviet Union during the early 1970s. The festival’s program describes a journey beginning in Moscow and moving outward into territories with different customs, beliefs, and cultural identities. Its archival material comes from Rome’s Audiovisual Archive of the Labour and Democratic Movement. [BFI’s Imperium program entry](https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/online/default.asp?BOparam%3A%3AWScontent%3A%3AloadArticle%3A%3Apermalink=imperium-lff26).
That premise provides a useful way into the Best Film winner: pay attention to the distance between a state’s image of itself and the lives visible within its borders. An empire can present unity as an accomplished fact. Images of individual communities can complicate that claim simply by preserving differences that an official narrative smooths away.
From the perspective of the people on camera, the central critical question concerns agency. Who appears as an individual with a particular life, and who becomes an illustration of somebody else’s argument? Archival filmmaking carries that tension because its subjects usually cannot answer the later interpretation placed around them.
This is a viewing framework rather than a verdict on particular sequences. The award makes Imperium a priority for discovery; evaluating its historical argument still requires examining how images are selected, ordered, and contextualized. A compelling face can hold our attention without explaining everything about the society around it.
9 Temples to Heaven: a family journey with different meanings
Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s film follows an aging grandmother who responds to a prophecy by taking her children and grandchildren on a nine-temple pilgrimage over a single day. The festival describes family interactions unfolding through conversations and gestures of care, with the van and temples serving as shared spaces. [BFI’s 9 Temples to Heaven program entry](https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam%3A%3AWScontent%3A%3AloadArticle%3A%3Apermalink=9-temples-to-heaven-lff26).
The character-centered appeal lies in the possibility that everyone makes the same journey for a different reason. For a grandmother, a pilgrimage might carry spiritual urgency. For relatives accompanying her, participation might involve devotion, duty, affection, or some mixture of all three. Those are interpretive possibilities raised by the premise, not claims about unverified exchanges.
A useful question for viewers is whether the film lets those motives coexist. Family dramas become richer when caring for someone does not require sharing every conviction that guides them. Sitting beside a relative, making time for them, and accepting an inconvenient journey can express love without resolving disagreement.
That distinction also animates our discussion of sisterhood and emotional responsibility in Sense and Sensibility. Relationships become dramatically interesting when affection takes the form of choices, obligations, and limits.
Concrete Land: keeping the family larger than the issue
Asmahan Bkerat’s documentary centers on an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family in Jordan facing racism, displacement, and threats to cultural continuity. The festival describes a story spanning generations, with home and familial connection at its center. [BFI’s Concrete Land program entry](https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam%3A%3AWScontent%3A%3AloadArticle%3A%3Apermalink=concrete-land-lff26).
For viewers, the essential distinction is between understanding a family’s circumstances and assuming those circumstances explain every member. Displacement is a public issue, but losing a home also means losing the setting of ordinary routines. Different generations may attach different meanings to what must be preserved.
My critical priority here would be specificity: whether each person emerges with individual desires, habits, and contradictions. Sympathy is a beginning, but a documentary portrait becomes more revealing when its subjects have room to exceed the role of deserving our sympathy.
Our commentary on judging documentary filmmaking beyond its surrounding controversy considers a related principle. A subject’s importance and a film’s achievement require connected but separate judgments. Attention to framing, access, and editorial choices helps make that distinction meaningful.
Aman: a short film with room for difficult questions
Premise spoiler: Aman concerns a trans man who discovers he is pregnant on the eve of gender-affirming surgery. The situation brings identity, masculinity, and fatherhood into tension.
The most useful starting point is the protagonist’s perspective. What does he want, what choices does he understand to be available, and how do other people’s expectations affect those choices? Approaching the story through those questions leaves room for a person whose experience cannot be reduced to a debate.
A short film has limited time to establish that complexity. The critical challenge is whether compression produces emotional precision while allowing uncertainty to remain. A difficult decision need not become an uncomplicated lesson to give a narrative shape.
What connects the winners—and what the awards cannot decide
My reading of this lineup is that belonging offers its strongest connecting thread. Historical identity, family ritual, a threatened home, and personal self-definition all raise questions about who gets to describe a life. That connection is an editorial interpretation, not evidence that the four juries followed a shared agenda.
For a practical watchlist, start with the subject that most interests you: archival history, intergenerational family relationships, observational documentary, or intimate short-form drama. Keep the special mentions alongside the winners rather than treating them as disposable footnotes.
The deeper opportunity in these awards is to follow recognition toward close attention. A prize can introduce a filmmaker; it cannot tell us everything about the people in the frame. The rewarding next step is to notice how each film makes those people visible—and where their lives resist the explanations offered for them.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 18, 2026 at 17:39:08 PDT (Los Angeles time)
