Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘Imperium’ Wins Top London Film Festival Prize

Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium has won the Best Film award in the official competition at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, taking the event’s top jury prize as the 2026 edition came to a close.

The Ukrainian filmmaker’s latest work revisits the Soviet Union in the early 1970s through archival images filmed by Italian camera crews. Rather than approaching that period as a conventional historical drama, the film builds its portrait from footage of everyday life and the social landscape before the Soviet state’s eventual collapse.

A jury choice rooted in the archive

Documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard led the official competition jury, joined by filmmaker Mariano Llinás and strategy executive Julie La Bassiere. In announcing the award, the panel praised the film’s wide-ranging view of a country and era that audiences have rarely seen from this perspective.

The jury also highlighted the film’s emotional force and visual character, calling attention to the way Loznitsa transforms historical material into an immersive experience. The win adds another major festival distinction to a filmmaker whose work frequently examines memory, power and the political history of Eastern Europe.

Imperium was not the only major winner announced on the festival’s final day. Sompot Chidgasornpongse received the Sutherland Award for first feature with 9 Temples to Heaven, a film about a man undertaking a one-day pilgrimage after hearing a troubling prophecy about his elderly mother.

Winners across the festival program

Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land won the Grierson Award in the documentary competition, while Rahul Roye’s Aman took the short film prize. Together, the results spread recognition across archival filmmaking, fiction, documentary work and shorts rather than concentrating the festival’s honors in a single style.

The London Film Festival concluded with a screening of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut. That closing event followed a program in which the awards spotlighted international filmmakers and distinct approaches to history, spirituality and place.

For Imperium, the Best Film prize provides a prominent platform at the end of the festival run. It also signals the jury’s confidence that archival cinema can do more than document the past: it can reshape how an audience encounters a vanished political world.