The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026, headquartered at BFI Southbank with galas at the Royal Festival Hall.
The festival was argued into existence at a dinner party in 1953, where the guests complained that London, alone among the great European capitals, had no film festival. James Quinn took the complaint away and staged the first one at the newly opened National Film Theatre in October 1957, a modest fifteen to twenty titles that had already succeeded at other festivals. Seven decades later it is the largest public film event in Britain, run by the British Film Institute, a charity founded in 1933 and holding the world’s largest film and television archive.
Its shape still follows from that founding idea. This is a festival for an audience rather than a market: there is no competitive palme, the galas are open to anyone who books, and the programme is assembled from the year’s festivals as much as from premieres, so a Londoner sees in twelve days what took a critic twelve months of travel.
The seventieth edition runs from 7 to 18 October 2026, across premieres, series and immersive work. BFI Southbank is its home, with the galas next door at the Royal Festival Hall and the rest of the programme at BFI IMAX, Curzon Soho, the ICA, the Prince Charles and Vue West End. The full programme is announced at the start of September, and the galas are the first part of it to go.