Sergei Loznitsa's Imperium has won Best Film at the seventieth BFI London Film Festival. The festival announced its competition winners on October 18. Sompot Chidgasornpongse's 9 Temples to Heaven received the Sutherland Award for a first feature, while Asmahan Bkerat's Concrete Land won the Grierson documentary award.
The short-film prize went to Rahul Roye's Aman. The audience awards remain open: voting closes on October 21, with the winners to be announced afterward.
Imperium draws on footage filmed across the Soviet Union by Italian crews between 1970 and 1973. Loznitsa assembled the material into a 176-minute documentary without voice-over. The journey begins in Moscow before moving through different regions, examining the distance between a centralized image of unity and the cultures within that empire.
The film is a German, French, Italian and Lithuanian production. Loznitsa wrote and directed it, with Audinga Kučinskaitė editing and Vladimir Golovnitski responsible for sound. The London award recognizes a work built around the interpretation of existing images, placing a documentary at the head of the festival's main competition.