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Chloé Zhao’s latest feature, Hamnet, has won the London Film Festival Audience Award. The Maggie O’Farrell adaptation was announced as the Audience Award winner this week by the BFI. The film screened as the Mayor of London Gala during the LFF, with Zhao in attendance alongside her leads Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal and producers, including Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes. Elsewhere, Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story, the latest work by Yemi Bamiro, won the Audience Award for Best British Discovery. The film is described as “a touching tribute to the forgotten photographer, freedom fighter and activist, who helped popularise the transformative Black is Beautiful movement.” This year’s London Film Festival featured 252 titles hailing from 79 countries. All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 28 world premieres (7 features, 1 series, 19 shorts, 1 immersive), 11 International Premieres (11 features, 1 short), and 20 European Premieres (12 features, 7 shorts, 1 immersive). The BFI has reported that the Festival clocked 235,853 attendees across the entire programme, including events for industry delegates and the LFF for Free programme. This figure is a record for the event. “Our biggest thanks go to the artists who generously shared their unique views of the world with us this year,” BFI London Film Festival’s Director Kristy Matheson said in a statement. “Across screenings, talks, exhibitions, immersive experiences, it was a delight to see industry and audiences engage with each other and this programme – proving once again the joy and comfort we all find in screen culture.”
