European Film Awards: nominations on November 14, a first US leg for the screening season, and how to watch

The European Film Academy will name the nominees in its main categories, including European Film, director, actress and actor, on Saturday, November 14, during the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The winners follow at the 39th European Film Awards on Saturday, January 16, 2027, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, which the Academy says it will stream live on its website. In between, the Academy’s European Award Season takes screenings of European films to 150 cities in 50 countries, and this time the United States is one of them.

This guide collects the dates the Academy has published, what is on the shortlist, and the ways it says audiences outside Europe can see the films.

Where the nominees come from

On October 14 the Academy published a shortlist of 68 features: 45 in fiction, 15 documentaries and 8 animated films, representing 40 European countries, with 25 directed or co-directed by women. Its 5,700 members watch them and vote on the nominations. A few awards run separately, among them European Discovery, European Short Film, the Young Audience Award, the LUX Audience Award and the honorary awards.

The eight animated films on the shortlist are Decorado, In Waves, Iron Boy, Jim Queen, Julián, Lucy Lost, Monster Mia and Viva Carmen. Iron Boy, from Louis Clichy, is also one of the three Young Audience nominees, with Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me and Alina Șerban’s I Matter. Viewers aged 12 to 19 across Europe choose that winner.

How to see the films, including in the US

The Academy’s season runs from November to the ceremony, through cinemas, festivals, cinematheques and online services. It says the United States takes part for the first time this year, with the Berkshire International Film Festival and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., presenting the European Union’s Transatlantic Rising Stars Program. The announcement gives no dates for those US events.

Online, MUBI will run a European Award Season collection of more than 100 titles and DAFilms a focus on European documentaries, while Festival Scope makes the short films in contention available to international audiences. The Academy does not say in which countries the MUBI and DAFilms collections can be watched. A fourth partner, filmfriend, works through more than 870 public libraries in Europe.

The Academy says last season’s screenings set a record, at more than 40,000 screenings and more than one million admissions, with all box-office takings left with the cinemas.

An honor for Hiam Abbass

The Academy announced on October 21 that Hiam Abbass will receive its European Achievement in World Cinema award and attend the ceremony as an honorary guest. Born in Nazareth, she has acted in more than 100 films, the Academy says, and US viewers may know her from Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and HBO’s Succession, which brought her a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2023.

What happened last year

At the 38th awards, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value took six prizes, more than any other film, according to the Academy, which says that ceremony was the first to sit prominently in the international awards season, just after the Golden Globes and while Oscar nomination voting was open. The 2027 date keeps it just after the Golden Globes, but no longer inside Oscar nomination voting: by our reading of the published calendars, January 16 is six days after the Golden Globes on January 10 and the day after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences closes Oscar nomination voting on January 15. Our awards season calendar has the other dates.