Elsinore leads the 2026 British Independent Film Awards nominations with 12

The British Independent Film Awards named their 2026 nominees on Tuesday, November 3, at One Hundred Shoreditch in London, and Elsinore has the most, with 12. The BFI describes Simon Stone’s drama as being about the Scottish actor Ian Charleson playing Hamlet for the last time while dying from AIDS, and Andrew Scott leads the cast. Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning has eight and Ashley Walters’s Animol has seven. BIFA says 39 British feature films are on the list.

We tallied BIFA’s full category list against those counts, and they match.

The race for the top prize

Five films are up for Best British Independent Film. Besides Elsinore and Barnard’s film, they are Effi o Blaenau, which the British Film Institute describes as a Welsh-language coming-of-age drama; Queen at Sea, Lance Hammer’s film about dementia, with Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay; and Tender Loving Care, which the BFI says is “billed as Mike Leigh’s swansong.” Leigh is also up for director and screenplay.

The director list is not the same five. Andrew Haigh, for A Long Winter, and Mark Jenkin, for Rose of Nevada, take the places of the Effi o Blaenau and Queen at Sea filmmakers. Last year’s top prize went to Pillion, ahead of The Ballad of Wallis Island, I Swear, My Father’s Shadow and Urchin.

The BFI also has a number of its own: films it backed picked up 39 nominations, it says, including Barnard’s and Walters’s. That is a separate figure from BIFA’s 39 feature films.

How the list lines up with the Gothams

BIFA’s list came a week after the nominations for the Gotham Awards in New York, and the two share several titles. By our comparison, every nominee for BIFA’s Best International Independent Film is also on the Gotham list: All of a Sudden, Club Kid, La Bola Negra, La Gradiva and Possible Love. Elsinore and Tender Loving Care appear on both too. Scott is nominated for lead performance at both, and the Gothams are also giving Elsinore their Legacy Tribute in Honor of Ian Charleson. The Gotham winners are named in New York on November 30, after BIFA’s craft winners and before its ceremony. Our Gotham nominations story has that list in full.

When U.S. viewers can see them

HBO Max says its November list may change and may not be complete. We did not confirm U.S. dates for the rest of the nominees, including I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning and Animol.

What comes next

BIFA says it will post the craft winners on its social channels on Tuesday, November 24, and name the rest at the Roundhouse on Sunday, December 6. The host, the juries and this year’s recipient of the Richard Harris Award, which Emily Watson received last year, are still to be announced.

One category is about where films play rather than the films themselves. Moviegoers chose five nominees for Cinema of the Year from almost 80 entrants, and a jury picks the winner: Abbeygate Cinema in Bury St Edmunds, Campus West in Welwyn Garden City, the Hippodrome in Bo’ness, The Kinema in the Woods in Woodhall Spa and The Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford.