BFI London Film Festival announces competition winners

BFI London Film Festival is drawing to a close and it has just handed out some pretty prestigious awards ahead of the Closing Night Gala.

BFI London Film Festival is drawing to a close and it has just handed out some pretty prestigious awards.

For 12 straight days, BFI London Film Festival has celebrated cinema in all its forms in the heart of London. The festival has now announced the winners of its competition strands and they are:

CORSAGE – Marie Kreutzer, wins Best Film Award in Official Competition
1976 – Manuela Martelli, wins Sutherland Award in First Feature Competition
ALL THAT BREATHES – Shaunak Sen, wins Grierson Award in Documentary Competition
AS MINE EXACTLY – Charlie Shackleton, wins Immersive Art and XR Award
I HAVE NO LEGS, AND I MUST RUN – Yue Li, wins Short Film Award in Short Film Competition

While the above films were chosen by an esteemed jury, the audience also had a say. The audience awards were awarded to:

BLUE BAG LIFE – Lisa Selby, Rebecca Hirsch Lloyd-Evans, Alex Fry, wins Audience Award – Feature
DROP OUT – Ade Femzo, wins Audience Award – Short

The short film audience award was the first of its kind this year.

I’ve been thinking about the EIFF, the Filmhouse and Belmont in Aberdeen. A big loss to the cultural landscape – for Scotland and the UK. Culture is precarious. Sorry for those who’ve lost their jobs. I hope that a form of cultural cinema can continue for their audiences…
— Ben Roberts (@bfiben) October 7, 2022

And with that, another brilliant year of London Film Festival comes to a close. This year has been particularly bittersweet as the news of Edinburgh Film Festival and the Filmhouse closing down broke during the festival. Patrons around the UK are anxiously waiting to see if some miracle could still save the world’s oldest film festival and some are demanding the BFI to take a bigger, more active role in ensuring cinema isn’t just a London-centric cultural space. You can read all our London Film Festival coverage here, including our 5-star review of Closing Night Gala film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.