London Today BFI London Film Festival 2026
BFI Southbank and other cinemas, London · Organized by British Film Institute
- Dates
- Oct 7, 2026 – Oct 18, 2026
- Format
- In person
- Where
- BFI Southbank and other cinemas, London
- Organizer
- British Film Institute
A film festival reaching its seventieth edition has outlived most of the distribution models it was built to serve, which is a reasonable thing to think about while queueing for a ticket.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from Wednesday 7 to Sunday 18 October 2026.
Elsinore opens it
The festival opens on Wednesday 7 October at the Royal Festival Hall with the European premiere of Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone and drawn from the life of the actor Ian Charleson. Andrew Scott plays the central role, with Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Juliet Stevenson, Monica Dolan, Adeel Akhtar and Peter Mullan around him.
Festival director Kristy Matheson, announcing it on 29 July: «Anchored by Andrew Scott’s astounding central performance, few films will leave a lasting imprint on audiences this year quite like Elsinore.»
Four competitions, not one
The festival runs four competitive categories: Best Film, Best Documentary (the Grierson Award), Best First Feature (the Sutherland Award) and the Short Film Award. The Audience Awards return for 2026.
Ten films are in Official Competition for Best Film, chosen from ten countries: the UK, Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan and Poland. The LFF Awards Jury announces the winner on Sunday 18 October.
Festival director Kristy Matheson framed the selection around its returning names: «As we celebrate the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival, it’s an honour to have a number of alumni filmmakers represented in the Official Competition...»
The shortlists for the other competitive categories are announced in September.
The useful fortnight
The programme lands a fortnight before anything can be bought. That gap is the festival handing every buyer the same information and then making them wait — and the people who spend it building a shortlist are the ones who get the screenings they wanted.
What a festival screening is for
Most of what plays at LFF will reach a cinema or a streaming service eventually. What will not repeat is the room: a first UK audience, frequently with the director in it, watching something before any consensus about it exists. That is the part the ticket buys.
Programme
- 7–18 October — the festival
- Twelve days, opening at the Royal Festival Hall with Elsinore.
- 2 September — the full programme
- The date the BFI gave for publishing everything that plays. To be announced
- 17 September — tickets
- General sale, with BFI Members booking before it. Prices to be announced
- During September — the other shortlists
- Documentary, First Feature and Short Film. Titles to be announced
- 18 October — the awards
- The LFF Awards Jury names the Best Film winner on the closing day.
Competition titles are the hardest tickets and rarely the best use of a first festival. The films with distribution deals already signed will be in cinemas within months; the ones worth a festival seat are the documentaries and first features, which are the categories where a London screening is sometimes the only one a film gets in this country.
Source: British Film Institute checked against the source
