This year’s BFI London Film Festival, the 66^th, has come to a close, and with it, we have the list of the lucky award winners from its competitive sections. Running from 5-16 October all across Central London, and with a handful of satellite screenings taking place across the UK as well, this year’s festival was a vibrant edition, with many big stars such as Timothée Chalamet and Brendan Fraser strutting the red carpet at the new festival venue of the Southbank Centre, as the local audience and industry got their first looks at some of this year’s big titles. This edition was also notable for marking the last before outgoing festival director Tricia Tuttle will step down, whilst also taking place amidst the backdrop of the sad news regarding the bankruptcy of the Centre for the Moving Image in Scotland, which runs the Edinburgh Film Festival.

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The festival’s Best Film Award was newly instituted a decade ago and rewards a movie in the competition sections, which the festival describes as a “celebration of the most exciting, innovative new films and cinematic storytelling, [which are] creative, beautiful and often provocative”. This year’s award went to Marie Kreutzer’s already much-loved Corsage [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Marie Kreutzer
interview : Marie Kreutzer
fiche film], starring Vicky Krieps in a bold reinterpretation of the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The jury, compèred by producer Tanya Seghatchian, and also featuring actress Gwendoline Christie, filmmaker and playwright Kemp Powers, director Chaitanya Tamhane, and Screen International journalist Charles Gant, called it “masterfully realised” and were “completely seduced by Krieps’s sublime performance of a woman out of time trapped in her own iconography and her rebellious yearning for liberation”.

Manuela Martelli’s 1976, capping its gradual rise to acclaim following its bow in this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, was given the Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition, which is one of the BFI’s longest-running and most prestigious prizes, having first been awarded in 1958. The jury, headed by US actress Nanah Mensah, and also featuring British comedian and actor Asim Chaudhry, Sight & Sound managing editor Isabel Stevens, and Edinburgh Film Festival creative director Kristy Matheson, praised it as a “historic film that is chillingly relevant to our time – a remarkable debut, original and imaginative in its symbolism, attention to detail and profound performances”.

The Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition, established in 2005 and named after British documentary pioneer John Grierson, went to Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Shaunak Sen
fiche film], which is currently, as they say, absolutely cleaning up at major festivals this year, having also won the top documentary awards at Sundance and on its in-person premiere at Cannes. For the jury, the Delhi-set avian-rescue doc was “pure cinema, [and] thrilling evidence of the present and future of non-fiction filmmaking”.

Charlie Shackleton’s Immersive Art and XR Competition victor As Mine Exactly was a popular attraction at the festival, a memoir of his teenage years and his relationship with his mother, which he performed for each viewer one-to-one in dozens of showings across the fortnight. The Short Film Competition winners, I Have No Legs, and I Must Run by Chinese director Yue Li, and Drop Out by Brit Ade Fenzo, are currently available to view on the BFI Player for those in the UK, along with all of the short films in competition.

The full list of winners is as follows:

Best Film Award
Corsage [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Marie Kreutzer
interview : Marie Kreutzer
fiche film] - Marie Kreutzer (Austria/Luxembourg/Germany/France)

Sutherland Award
1976 - Manuela Martelli (Chile/Argentina/Qatar)

Grierson Award
All That Breathes [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Shaunak Sen
fiche film] - Shaunak Sen (UK/India/USA)

Immersive Art and XR Award
As Mine Exactly - Charlie Shackleton (UK)

Short Film Award
I Have No Legs, and I Must Run - Yue Li (China)

Audience Award – Feature
Blue Bag Life [+lire aussi :
critique
fiche film] - Lisa Selby, Rebecca Hirsch Lloyd-Evans, Alex Fry (UK)

Audience Award – Short
Drop Out - Ade Femzo (UK)