Established in 2009, the BFI London Film Festival’s Best Film Award celebrates inspiring, inventive and distinctive filmmaking. Previous recipients include Jacques Audiard for A Prophet. Recent winners include Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist in 2023, Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail in 2024 and Landmarks by Lucrecia Martel in 2025.

This year’s nominated titles bring together an international line-up of filmmakers from across the world – with an incredible range of storytelling, from a wide range of voices and styles, spanning fiction to documentary, from post-war Europe to Dhaka, Japan and beyond.

The nominees are…

7 Miles Out (directed by Carol Morley)

Act 3 (directed by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor)

Glaxo (directed by Benjamín Naishtat)

Imperium (directed by Sergei Loznitsa)

Ketticè (directed by Giovanni Tortorici)

Look Back (directed by Hirokazu Koreeda)

My Notes on Mars (directed by Lili Horvát)

The Difficult Bride (directed by Rubaiyat Hossain)

The Idiot(s) (directed by Małgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert)

Woman Unknown (directed by May el-Toukhy)