Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘Imperium’ Wins Best Film at BFI London Film Festival — SkimNews
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- Sergei Loznitsa's "Imperium" won Best Film in the 70th BFI London Film Festival competition, revisiting the Soviet Union of the early 1970s through footage shot by Italian cameramen; the jury called it "richly evocative and emotionally engaging on all levels."
- Sompot Chidgasornpongse's "9 Temples to Heaven" — Thailand's Oscar submission and the director's first fiction feature — won the Sutherland Award in the first feature competition, with jurors praising it as "an accomplished first feature paving his own path."
- Asmahan Bkerat's "Concrete Land", a feature directorial debut following generations of a mixed-race family in Jordan resisting displacement, took the Grierson Award for documentary; the jury highlighted "the quiet resilience and dignity of this family."
- Rahul Roye's "Aman" won the Short Film Award for its story of a trans man who learns he is pregnant the night before his gender-affirming surgery, and is streaming free on BFI Player until Oct. 25.
- Bertil Nilsson's "Masc" received a special mention as a fresh British debut about a drifter named Robin, while Theo Rollason's "Queer Edward II" was singled out for its archive-material portrait of Derek Jarman against Britain's 1980s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws.
- The competition jury was chaired by Sam Pollard ("MLK/FBI"); the Sutherland jury was led by Amir El-Masry ("Limbo"); and the documentary jury was headed by Sandhya Suri ("Santosh").
- Audience voting for the festival's best feature and best British discovery prizes closes Oct. 21, with winners to be announced afterward.
Why it matters: The 70th-edition competition prize cements Loznitsa's standing as a leading archival-essay filmmaker and gives Oscar-contending momentum to Thailand's '9 Temples to Heaven' ahead of its international campaign, while the shorts and documentary winners signal BFI's appetite for debut filmmakers tackling identity, displacement, and gender — the trans-pregnancy short 'Aman' in particular arriving in a year of heightened trans-rights scrutiny in U.K. public life.
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