Simon Stone’s Elsinore has taken 12 nominations at the 2026 British Independent Film Awards, more than any other film, which puts a story about one of the National Theatre’s most remembered Hamlets at the front of the British awards race. Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning follows with eight, and Animol, Ashley Walters’s first feature as director, has seven.
The nominations were announced in London on Tuesday 3 November by Jay Lycurgo and Posy Sterling, both past BIFA winners. In all, 39 British features are recognised, a field cut down from the BIFA longlists published in October. Effi o Blaenau and Queen at Sea have six nominations each, while Extra Geography, Straight Circle and Florid have five apiece.
The front-runners
Elsinore tells the true story of the actor Ian Charleson and what he faced while preparing to play Hamlet at the National Theatre. Its nominations include Best British Independent Film, Best Director for Stone, Best Screenplay for Stephen Beresford, Best Lead Performance for Andrew Scott and Best Supporting Performance for Billie Piper, along with a run of craft categories from cinematography and editing to costume, make-up and hair, and original music.
Tender Loving Care, courtesy of BIFA
Animol, courtesy of BIFA
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, adapted by Enda Walsh from Keiran Goddard’s novel, follows five childhood friends from a Birmingham estate who reach their thirties to find the lives they imagined never arrived. Lola Petticrew, Daryl McCormack, Jay Lycurgo, Joe Cole and Anthony Boyle share a nomination for Best Ensemble Performance.
Animol is set inside a young offender institution, where a teenager named Troy is drawn into a world of gangs and loyalty. Tut Nyuot is nominated for Best Lead Performance and Breakthrough Performance, Sekou Diaby for Best Supporting Performance and Breakthrough Performance, and Walters for the Douglas Hickox Award for Best Debut Director.
The main categories
Five films contend for Best British Independent Film: Effi o Blaenau, Marc Evans’s film based on Gary Owen’s monodrama Iphigenia in Splott; Elsinore; I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning; Queen at Sea, with Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall; and Mike Leigh’s London family study Tender Loving Care.
Best Director goes to a choice of Stone, Barnard, Andrew Haigh for A Long Winter, Mark Jenkin for Rose of Nevada and Leigh. The lead performance field is Nyuot, Leisa Gwenllian (Effi o Blaenau), Scott, Erin Doherty (Faith), Jonathan Jules (Florid) and Binoche. In support, Diaby and Piper are joined by Bill Pullman (Everybody Digs Bill Evans), Claire Foy (Ink), Calder-Marshall and Courtenay.
Best International Independent Film brings together Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Club Kid, La Bola Negra, La Gradiva and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love. The Best Feature Documentary nominees are All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, Everybody to Kenmure Street, One in a Million, Something Familiar and We, the Hated.
Cinema of the Year, shortlisted by cinemagoers, is between Abbeygate Cinema in Bury St Edmunds, Campus West in Welwyn Garden City, the Hippodrome Cinema in Bo’ness, the Kinema in the Woods in Woodhall Spa and the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford.
Key dates
- Tuesday 24 November: craft winners revealed on BIFA’s social channels.
- Sunday 6 December: the ceremony at the Roundhouse, where every other winner is named.
- Still to come: the Richard Harris Award recipient, the host and this year’s juries.
For where BIFA sits among the Baftas, Globes and Oscars, see our awards season calendar.
Where to watch
- Possible Love arrives on Netflix worldwide, the UK included, on Friday 6 November.
- Most of the other nominees have yet to confirm UK release dates; each film’s page on the British Independent Film Awards site is the place to check before the ceremony.
Sources
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