The 2026 BFI London Film Festival opened Wednesday evening with a passionate homecoming screening of Simon Stone’s buzzy awards season frontrunner Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott.
Stone was present at the screening with his cast, including Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, and Johnny Flynn. The film’s wider cast features Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Monica Dolan, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke, Georgie Glen, Sadie Soverall, Adeel Akhtar, Dickie Beau, Juliet Stevenson and Peter Mullan.
Written by Stephen Beresford (Pride), the film tells the moving true story of the actor Ian Charleson’s preparation to play Hamlet at the National Theatre in London while seriously ill with AIDS.
The film debuted at Telluride, where it drew enthusiastic reviews. Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye described the film as a “triumphant epitaph for an extraordinary man.” The festival buzz seems to have already catapulted Scott into awards discussions. The Irish actor was reflective when he spoke with us this evening on the LFF carpet.
“I’m so grateful that I even get to play this part,” he said. “I’m not sure that even 10 years ago they would’ve put me in a film like this, as an out gay actor.”
The actor received an enormous standing ovation from the crowd inside the Royal Festival Hall this evening as the film’s credits rolled. Scott was called back on stage by BFI Festivals Director Kristy Matheson, and he thanked the London crowd before calling on stage the real-life people who inspired the film alongside their acting counterparts. This included Linda Tolhurst, played by Monica Dolan; Ralph Mills, played by Paul Chahidi; Sean Mathias, played by Mathew Beard; Dr Margaret Johnson, played by Olivia Colman; and Ian Charleson’s sister, Lizzie Charleson.
Before exiting the stage, Scott asked the house DJ to play a disco version of Ethel Merman’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, telling the audience in the Royal Festival Hall that it best “encapsulates” Charleson, “who loved this industry so much.”
“If you want to, please feel free to dance on your way out of here, like Ian, who went out performing,” Scott told the crowd.
Elsinore played TIFF before landing at the LFF, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year.
“We talked about it for a while as you do with these big round numbers,” Matheson said of an anniversary during an interview with Deadline ahead of this year’s edition. “But really, the films took over. There were so many exceptional titles this year, so it really became about how we build a programme that gives people not the definitive snapshot, but a really interesting view of cinema in 2026.”
Highlight titles set to screen include Ava DuVernay’s 14th, which will screen in the festival’s Special Presentations strand. The film details how the tenets of the 14th Amendment, ratified post-Civil War, are now under systematic attack. The festival will screen Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and Taika Waititi’s Klara and The Sun adaptation. Interestingly, Boots Riley will also travel to London with his latest, I Love Boosters, for its first screening this side of the pond almost six months after its U.S. release.
“It feels very at home in this programme,” Matheson said of Riley’s Boosters. “It’s a bright and bold heist movie. But it’s also speaking very deeply about labour rights, unionising and the politics of capitalism. It’s doing all of this, and then there’s a whole other subplot. It’s a film full of invention. It felt like a slam dunk for us in terms of the kind of film we would really love.”
Legendary documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard will lead this year’s Official Competition jury. Pollard will be joined by Argentine filmmaker and writer Mariano Llinás (The Life of Jorge Luis Borges) and Julie La Bassiere, Chief Strategy Officer at DDA Global.
LFF is also screening Pollard’s latest title, Tutu, a feature-length doc on the life of South African anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“He’s not just making documentaries that look at a topic straight on; somehow, he gets under the skin of a concept or a person,” Matheson said of Pollard. “That’s the kind of thinker you want looking at films.”
British Egyptian actor and producer Amir El-Masry is heading the First Feature Competition (Sutherland Award), Sandhya Suri is the Documentary Competition jury head, and Helen Simmons is leading the Short Film jury competition.
World Premiere titles screening at the festival include Ray Gunn, the latest feature from animation auteur Brad Bird (The Incredibles); the Ramla Ali biopic In the Shadows; and Laika’s new animation film Wildwood. The festival’s repertory strand will also screen some highly-anticipated titles, including a new restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth and the new print of Ken Russell’s The Devils.
“I’d also really encourage people to see a film in our archive restorations strand called La Dérive—a French film made in 1964 by Paula Delsol,” Matheson said. “It’s a largely undiscovered film from the French New Wave by a female director. It has just been restored, so I think it will be wonderful for people to discover.”
The LFF closes on October 18 with Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut.
