The British Film Institute today said that its annual London Film Festival clocked its largest in-person attendance for a decade during this year’s edition, which ran from October 9 – 20.
Figures published by the BFI said attendance across both free and paid-for in-person screenings and events at London venues increased by 92%, with 49% of tickets being booked by first-time LFF attendees. Overall, 230,342 attended the festival in person, an increase of 18% from 2023’s 194,960.
“Our biggest thanks go to the artists and industry colleagues from the UK and across the globe who fueled our collective curiosity this year,” BFI London Film Festival Director Kristy Matheson said in a statement this afternoon. “It was a delight to see audiences engage with each other and this programme – proving once again the joy and comfort we all find in screen culture.”
The BFI today also announced the winners of the festival’s audience awards. Darren Thornton’s comedy-drama Four Mothers, about one Irish son juggling four very different mothers, won the Audience Award for Best Feature. Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson’s Holloway, which follows six women who were formerly incarcerated at what was once the largest women’s prison in Europe won the Audience Award for Best Documentary, and Jamie Benyon’s Two Minutes, clinched the Audience Award for Best Short Film. The flick is a tale about two brothers who are interrupted while they are robbing an off licence.
The London Film Festival ended two weeks ago with a screening of the Pharrell Williams biopic Piece by Piece. Big winners in the festival’s competition strands included Memoir Of A Snail, the latest stop motion pic from Oscar-winning filmmaker Adam Elliot. That film won best film while Laura Carreira’s haunting debut feature On Falling won the Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition. Produced by Jack Thomas-O’Brien at Sixteen Films, On Falling is the first British feature to win the Sutherland Award since 2010. Clio Barnard won it that year with The Arbor. Previous winners include Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Robert Eggers, Julia Ducournau, and Mati Diop.
