BFI London Film Festival Reveals 10-Film Competition Lineup for Its 70th Edition
The BFI London Film Festival has unveiled the 10 titles that will compete for its best film award at the 70th edition, running 7–18 October 2026 in London and across the UK. The lineup spans 10 countries and names familiar figures on both sides of the camera — Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monica Bellucci, Aimee Lou Wood and Mackenzie Davis among them. An LFF awards jury will decide the winner. (Variety)
Festival director Kristy Matheson announced the official competition selection on 17 August, according to Variety. The 10 films represent the UK, Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan and Poland — a deliberately wide geographic spread that puts debut-era coming-of-age stories beside archival found-footage essays and period thrillers.
Kore-eda's entry is Look Back (Japan), a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga one-shot about two girls, Fujino and Kymoto, who bond over their dream of becoming manga artists across more than a decade. The film was already selected for the Venice International Film Festival's competition section — where award results are announced on 12 September — and GKIDS has acquired it for North America as its next contemporary live-action title. (Variety; Crunchyroll News; GKIDS)
From the UK, Carol Morley's 7 Miles Out adapts her semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Stockport in the 1970s and 1980s, following a character named Anne who struggles with her father's suicide. Ireland's entry, Act 3 by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor — who previously brought Baltimore to LFF in 2023 — is a cinematic essay on ageing, legacy, and the intersection of artistic and personal relationships, built around their film project on Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. (Variety)
Brazil-Argentina's Glaxo, directed by Benjamín Naishtat, is a period-noir thriller set in the Argentine city of Chivilcoy, where a betrayal among friends is disrupted by a retired police officer, his wife, and two visiting American Mormons. Giovanni Tortorici's Ketticè (Italy) is a coming-of-age story set in early-2000s Palermo about a dissatisfied 16-year-old named Giulio, with Monica Bellucci as his mother; Tortorici continues his collaboration with producer Luca Guadagnino after his debut Diciannove at LFF 2024. (Variety)
Sergei Loznitsa's Imperium (Germany-France-Italy-Lithuania) takes a different form entirely: an archival documentary using footage shot by Italian cameramen in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, drawn from Rome's Audiovisual Archive of the Labour and Democratic Movement. The remaining competition titles come from directors Lili Horvát (Hungary), Malgorzata Szumowska and May el-Toukhy (Denmark), and Michal Englert (Poland). Cast members across the lineup include Rupert Friend and Johnny Flynn alongside Wood, Bellucci and Davis. (Variety)
For audiences, October's screenings offer a first look at films that will shape the conversation through the autumn awards corridor. For Kore-eda's Look Back in particular, Venice in September arrives first — and the London showcase follows weeks later, giving two major festival juries a close look at the same title.
