In this guide
The BFI London Film Festival runs 7 to 18 October 2026, its 70th edition. It is the largest public film event in the UK, and unlike Cannes or Venice it is built for ordinary ticket-buyers, not accredited industry — most of the programme is on general sale, and most of it is affordable.
The part that catches people out is the calendar. Tickets went on general sale at 10am on 17 September, after a week of priority booking for Members, and the screenings everyone wanted went in that week. Elsinore, which opens the festival on 7 October, and The Debut, which closes it on the 18th, are both sold out at every screening, the repeats and the relaxed screening included. Much of the rest of the programme is still bookable, and there is a further release at 10am on 1 October.
💡 The Short Version: Tickets are on sale now, and the galas went in the first week. The BFI’s ticket availability page lists every screening that is not yet full and refreshes every half hour. If you are 16 to 25, join BFI 25 & Under before you book: it is free, and it makes every festival ticket £6. Standard tickets start at £10, plus a £1 booking fee capped at £3 a transaction and dropped entirely at the box office. If your film has sold out, there is a fresh release at 10am on 1 October, another at 10am every festival morning, face-value resale on Twickets, and a returns and standby queue at the venue on the night.
🧭 Plan the rest of it: Cheap cinema tickets · Best independent cinemas · Late-night eating · Things to do in London in October · NFL London Games
Festival dates
| Date | Time | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Wed 2 September | 11am | Full programme revealed — done |
| Wed 9 September | 10am | Priority booking opened — BFI Patrons — done |
| Thu 10 September | 10am | Priority booking opened — BFI Members — done |
| Thu 17 September | 10am | General sale opened — done |
| Thu 1 October | 10am | Extra tickets released, and LFF for Free booking opens |
| Wed 7 – Sun 18 October | — | The festival itself |
Two things follow from this. The first is that membership no longer buys a head start on the 2026 festival: the priority windows have closed, so £44 spent after that saves booking fees and buys the 2027 window, not a seat in October. The second is that 1 October is a genuine second chance that most people miss — it is a real release of held-back stock, not a token gesture.
What it costs
Tickets start at £10, or £6 if you are 16 to 25, plus a £1-a-ticket booking fee online and by phone, capped at £3 a transaction. Buy at the BFI Southbank box office and there is no fee at all; Members and Patrons never pay it. These are the confirmed 2026 prices, from the festival’s own booking page:
| Screening type | 2026 price |
|---|---|
| Weekday matinee, before 5pm | £13 |
| Evenings, and weekend matinees | £18 |
| Gala premiere, Royal Festival Hall | £21–£30 |
| Opening and Closing Night Gala | £40 |
| Repeat matinee of a gala, weekday / weekend | £16 / £18 |
| Special Presentation, premiere | £21 |
| Special Presentation, matinee weekday / weekend | £16 / £18 |
| Surprise Film | £21 |
| Family strand | £10 adult, £6 child |
| Relaxed screenings | £6 |
| 16 to 25 year olds, anything | £6 |
Two prices for 2026 are already fixed, and both are fundraising tickets, not ordinary admission: £1,000 for the Opening Night Gala, which includes red-carpet arrival and receptions either side of the film, and £250 for the Closing Night Gala, which does not. These exist to raise money for the BFI. They are not the normal way in, and standard gala tickets for both films go on sale with everything else.
If you are 16 to 25, read this first
BFI 25 & Under is free to join, open to anyone aged 16 to 25, and makes London Film Festival tickets £6.
It is worth being precise about this, because the scheme has two different rates and people conflate them. The same free membership gets you £4 tickets for regular year-round screenings at BFI Southbank, and £6 tickets for the London Film Festival and BFI Flare. So a festival ticket at £6 is the correct price, not an error.
At £6 against a £13–£18 standard ticket, this is the largest discount available to anyone at the festival, and it costs nothing to set up. Set the account up before you book: the £6 price only shows when you are logged into it.
Other concessions
Reduced prices are available to over-60s, students with valid ID, and anyone on Universal Credit, Pension Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance. The last of those was £6 on the day in 2025, but it requires signing up in person at the box office beforehand with two documents proving eligibility — not something you can do online on the morning. Concessions do not apply to Screen Talks or screenings at the Southbank Centre.
Access: companion tickets are free for guests who need support, with a CEA Card, Access Card, National Disability Card or National Carers Card accepted as proof. Book on 020 7960 2102 and quote ACCESS. Every festival venue is step-free except the Prince Charles Cinema.
Is BFI Membership worth it?
Membership costs £44 a year paying by direct debit without a printed programme, £54 with one, or £60 as a one-off card payment. It gets you priority booking, which for 2026 ran from 10 September and has closed, no booking fees, two free tickets for standard BFI Southbank screenings, and up to £2.50 off Southbank and IMAX tickets.
The arithmetic, if the festival is the only reason you are considering it:
- The booking fee saving is £1 a ticket. To recover £44 on that alone you would need to buy 44 tickets.
- The two free tickets and the £2.50 discount are Southbank benefits, useful year-round but not at the festival.
- What you are actually buying is the priority window, and the 2026 one has closed. A membership taken out after the 2026 windows closed applies to the 2027 festival.
So: if you go to BFI Southbank through the year anyway, membership pays for itself comfortably on the free tickets and the per-ticket discount. If you turn up once a year for the festival, it does not pay for itself in cash — it buys the 2027 head start on the screenings that sell out. Whether that is worth £44 depends entirely on whether there is a film you would be disappointed to miss.
The Patron tiers — £2,000, £6,500 and £15,000 — got one further day of priority, on 9 September, along with a personalised booking service. That is a philanthropic decision, not a ticketing one.
Where it happens
BFI Southbank.
Seven London venues for 2026:
- BFI Southbank — the hub, and where most of the programme screens
- Royal Festival Hall — the galas, including both Opening and Closing Night, and the Surprise Film
- BFI IMAX, Waterloo
- Curzon Soho
- Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Square
- ICA, The Mall
- Vue West End, Leicester Square
The festival is not exclusively a London event. Selected films play at ten partner cinemas around the UK — Broadway Nottingham, Chapter Cardiff, Glasgow Film Theatre, HOME Manchester, MAC Birmingham, Queen’s Film Theatre Belfast, Showroom Sheffield, Tyneside Newcastle, Filmhouse Edinburgh and Watershed Bristol — and a selection streams UK-wide on BFI Player. Press and industry screenings run separately at Picturehouse Central.
If you are booking several films in a day, check the venues before you check the times. Southbank to Leicester Square is about 20 minutes on foot across Waterloo Bridge, and the festival schedules screenings tightly enough that a cross-river gap can catch you out.
What is already announced
The full programme was published on 2 September. The headline announcements:
The Opening Night Gala is Elsinore, at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday 7 October. Directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford, it tells the true story of the actor Ian Charleson preparing to play Hamlet at the National Theatre while facing HIV/AIDS, with Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman leading a cast that includes Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn and Luke Thompson.
The Closing Night Gala is The Debut, getting its UK premiere on the evening of Sunday 18 October. It is Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to A Real Pain, which itself premiered at this festival in 2024, and he directs and stars alongside Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti and Halle Bailey.
The galas are the festival’s premieres: the BFI said the Elsinore cast was expected to attend the Opening Night Gala. Gala tickets are on public sale like any other screening, at the prices above. To see the stars arrive, not the film, or to find the other premieres London holds through the year, read how to see stars at a London film premiere. The Royal Festival Hall also hosted the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, whose red carpet has free fan-pen places.
The Official Competition — ten films in the running for Best Film:
| Film | Director |
|---|---|
| 7 Miles Out | Carol Morley |
| Act 3 | Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor |
| Glaxo | Benjamín Naishtat |
| Imperium | Sergei Loznitsa |
| Ketticè | Giovanni Tortorici |
| Look Back | Hirokazu Koreeda |
| My Notes on Mars | Lili Horvát |
| The Difficult Bride | Rubaiyat Hossain |
| The Idiot(s) | Małgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert |
| Woman Unknown | May el-Toukhy |
Winners are announced on Sunday 18 October. There are four juried awards — Best Film from the Official Competition, the Grierson Award for documentary, the Sutherland Award for a first feature, and the Short Film Award — plus separate Audience Awards voted for by ticket-holders, which are decided after the festival closes, not on the night.
The festival also runs LFF for Free most years — free talks, short film programmes, immersive and VR work and family workshops, largely at BFI Southbank across the two festival weekends. For 2026 the BFI says LFF for Free events can be booked from 10am on Thursday 1 October, two tickets per person, and a ticket does not guarantee entry — it is first come, first served on the day.
How the programme is organised
The strands have been stable for years, and they are the fastest way to navigate a programme of this size once it lands. Alongside the Galas and the four competitions, films are grouped as Love, Debate, Laugh, Dare, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Create and Family, with Treasures for restored archive classics, Experimenta for artist and experimental film, and Expanded for immersive and XR work.
For scale: the 2026 edition presents 251 features, shorts, series and immersive works from 88 countries across the 12 days, against 247 from 79 countries in 2025 — which is the useful context for the sold-out panic below. A dozen or so screenings sell out in minutes. Several hundred do not.
Booking now that general sale is open
Start at the ticket availability page. It lists every screening and event that is not yet full, including tickets released back into sale, and it refreshes every 30 minutes. There is a filter on it for screenings still selling at £10.
What has gone. Both the Opening and Closing Night Galas: Elsinore is sold out at the Royal Festival Hall premiere, both repeats and the relaxed screening, and The Debut is sold out at the Royal Festival Hall and at both simulcasts, in NFT1 and at the Prince Charles. That is the pattern across the red-carpet premieres.
What has not. On 19 September the availability page still listed gala titles — Being Heumann, Prima Facie, A Long Winter — alongside Official Competition films including Imperium and Act 3, documentary strand screenings and the whole immersive programme. The films that sell out first are the ones with a famous cast and a single evening screening.
The two-ticket limit has lapsed. It capped bookings at two per film per customer, or four for a family film, until 17 September. Group bookings are straightforward now.
Log in first. You need to be signed in to the BFI’s booking site to see prices and to book.
Book the second screening, not the premiere. Most films in the programme screen more than once, and the repeat is very often a weekday matinee at £13–£16 rather than a £21–£30 gala. The premiere is where the red carpet, the director introduction and the competition are; the second screening is the same film, cheaper and far easier to get. If you want to see the film, not the event, book the repeat.
If it has already sold out
Four routes, in the order worth trying them.
1. The daily 10am release
Once the festival starts, more tickets are released online at 10am each morning for that day’s screenings. This is particularly worth doing for Royal Festival Hall screenings, because it is a large venue and production holds are released late.
2. Twickets
Returned and unwanted tickets are resold through Twickets, where London Film Festival tickets have been listed under official festival pages for the past couple of years. The relevant thing about Twickets is the price cap: it is a face-value resale platform, so a ticket is listed at what the original buyer paid, plus Twickets’ own fee. You are not bidding against anyone.
Search for “BFI London Film Festival” at twickets.live. Now that general sale has been and gone, tickets appear as people’s plans change, and the listings build through the fortnight before the festival. Set an alert for the screening you want rather than refreshing.
It works in the other direction too: if you end up with a ticket you cannot use, listing it there is how you get your money back without breaking the BFI’s resale rules.
3. Returns at the box office
Go to the venue box office 45 minutes before the screening and ask whether any tickets have been returned. Staff check returns first, and if there are none they will point you at the standby queue.
4. The standby queue
Join it 30 minutes before the screening starts. Standby tickets are released 15 minutes before the film.
One detail that catches people out: for Royal Festival Hall screenings, the standby queue is at BFI Southbank, in the Atrium box office, not at the Southbank Centre itself. Turning up at the RFH doors will cost you your place. At Curzon Soho, the Prince Charles, the ICA, BFI IMAX and Vue West End, the BFI’s advice is to try the standby queue 15 minutes before the start.
Standby is a genuine route rather than a formality — festival screenings have a high no-show rate, particularly for weekday matinees and late-evening slots — but it is not a guarantee, and it is a poor plan for the galas.
What not to do
Do not buy above face value. The BFI’s terms cap resale at 20% above the face value shown on the ticket, and state that it may cancel the original booking if that is breached. A ticket bought for triple the price from a stranger can simply be void when it is scanned, and you will have no way to recover the money.
Be careful with social media resale. Tickets do circulate in Facebook groups and on X, and some of those are genuine people who cannot make a screening. There is no protection if they are not, and no way to verify a ticket before you pay. Twickets exists precisely to solve this problem.
If you are a member, do not resell priority-window tickets for profit. The BFI’s membership terms say it can cancel your membership without notice or refund for using priority booking for commercial gain.
After the festival
Most of the festival’s venues screen all year, and several are worth a trip on an ordinary week. Our London cinemas guide covers the independents, the repertory programmes and the two screens that show 70mm.
A practical plan
If you want to do the festival without overthinking it:
- Now — if you are 16 to 25, join BFI 25 & Under. It is free and makes every ticket £6.
- Now — read the programme, then open the ticket availability page and book what is left. Films with a second or third screening are the easy ones.
- During the festival — 10am online each morning, then returns at 45 minutes and standby at 30 minutes for anything still out of reach.
Deciding whether October is the right time for your trip? Best Time to Visit London sets the month’s weather, crowds and cost against the rest of the year.
Ticket prices, booking dates, the booking fee, the ticket limit and the LFF for Free booking date are the 2026 figures from the BFI’s own tickets and booking page. Sold-out screenings and what is still bookable come from the BFI’s own film listings and its ticket availability page. All checked 19 September 2026.
Common questions
When is the BFI London Film Festival 2026?
7 to 18 October 2026. It is the 70th edition. Tickets have been on general sale since 10am on 17 September 2026, with a further release at 10am on 1 October. Elsinore opens the festival on 7 October and The Debut closes it on 18 October; both are sold out at every screening.
When do London Film Festival tickets go on sale?
They went on general sale at 10am on Thursday 17 September 2026, after BFI Patrons booked from 9 September and Members from 10 September. Tickets are on sale now, and the BFI's ticket availability page lists what is not yet full. The next release of held-back tickets is at 10am on Thursday 1 October, and more go online at 10am each morning during the festival.
How much are London Film Festival tickets?
Tickets start at £10, and £6 for 16 to 25 year olds with a BFI 25 & Under account. Standard screenings are £13 for weekday matinees before 5pm and £18 for evenings and weekend matinees. Gala premieres are £21 to £30, the Opening and Closing Night Galas £40, the Surprise Film £21, and Relaxed screenings are always £6. Add a £1 booking fee, which BFI Members and Patrons do not pay.
Is there a cheap London Film Festival ticket for under-25s?
Yes. BFI 25 & Under is free to join for anyone aged 16 to 25, and gets you £6 tickets to London Film Festival screenings. It is a different rate from the £4 the same scheme gets you for regular year-round screenings at BFI Southbank, so do not be surprised when festival tickets come up at £6.
Is BFI Membership worth it for the London Film Festival?
Not for the 2026 booking, which has opened to everyone. Membership is £44 a year by direct debit, and what it saves you is the £1-a-ticket booking fee, capped at £3 a transaction and not charged at all at the box office. It makes financial sense if you also use BFI Southbank the rest of the year, because it includes two free standard Southbank tickets and up to £2.50 off. Bought after the 2026 windows closed, its festival benefit is the priority window for the 2027 edition.
How do you get tickets for a sold-out London Film Festival screening?
Four routes. Extra tickets are released online at 10am each morning during the festival, and more £10 tickets go on sale every Friday at 1pm. Returned tickets appear on Twickets, which caps resale at face value. At the venue, ask at the box office 45 minutes before the screening for returns. If there are none, join the standby queue 30 minutes before — standby tickets are released 15 minutes before the film starts.
Where does the London Film Festival take place?
Across seven London venues in 2026: BFI Southbank, BFI IMAX, the Royal Festival Hall (which hosts the galas), Curzon Soho, the Prince Charles Cinema, the ICA and Vue West End. Selected films also screen at partner cinemas around the UK and stream on BFI Player.
Can you resell a London Film Festival ticket you cannot use?
Yes, but not for profit. The BFI's own terms cap resale at 20% above face value and say it may cancel the original booking if that is breached. Twickets, where LFF tickets have been listed in recent years, caps resale at face value plus its own fee. Reselling tickets bought in a member priority window for commercial gain can get your BFI Membership cancelled without a refund.
