Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved, with Javier Bardem as a director who casts his estranged daughter, had its UK premiere as a London Film Festival Gala at the Royal Festival Hall.
Javier Bardem, the Oscar winner of No Country for Old Men, led Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Thursday 8 October 2026. It had its UK premiere in the festival’s Gala strand.
Sorogoyen was born in Madrid in 1981, the grandson of the filmmaker Antonio del Amo. He took a history degree at the Complutense University before entering the ECAM film school in 2004.
His short Madre won a Goya and an Academy Award nomination, and The Realm won him the Goyas for direction and original screenplay in 2019. The Beasts took nine Goyas, including Best Film, and the César for best foreign film.
He writes with Isabel Peña, as he did here. Esteban, an Oscar-winning director played by Bardem, returns to Spain to film a story set in 1930s Western Sahara, then a Spanish colony. He casts his estranged daughter Emilia in the lead.
Victoria Luengo plays Emilia, and the shoot in Fuerteventura reopens thirteen years of grievance between them.
It competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, and Curzon distributes it in Britain. Bardem first came to notice in Jamón jamón.