Sergei Loznitsa's Imperium has won the Best Film Award in the Official Competition at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, which ran from October 7 to 18 in London.
The documentary is composed entirely of archival footage shot between 1970 and 1973 by a group of Italian filmmakers traveling through the Soviet Union. It spans from Central Asian nomadic encampments to Red Square, from remote Caucasus villages to the Far East. The jury, led by filmmaker Sam Pollard, described it as "an extraordinary film that explores the Soviet Union in the early 1970s."
Loznitsa, born in Belarus and based in Germany, has built a career at the intersection of documentary and archival reconstruction. Imperium premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026 before traveling to London.
The remaining competition prizes at this year's festival: Sompot Chidgasornpongse's 9 Temples to Heaven took the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature. Asmahan Bkerat's Concrete Land, a multi-generational portrait of a mixed-race family facing displacement in Jordan, won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary. Rahul Roye's Aman won the Short Film Award.
The LFF Audience Awards, for which public voting closed on October 21, have yet to be announced.
