Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro will be awarded the British Film Institute's highest honor, the BFI Fellowship, recognizing his extraordinary contributions to cinema. The accolade celebrates his distinctive artistry across animation and live-action films, as a Mexican director working in both Spanish and English. The award ceremony is set for May 2026 in London.
Award Details
The BFI Fellowship will be presented to Guillermo del Toro at the annual BFI Chair’s dinner, hosted by BFI Chair Jay Hunt, in London in May 2026. As part of the celebration, del Toro will participate in a public Career Conversation at BFI Southbank. A retrospective of his films will screen at BFI IMAX and on BFI Player, and he will curate a film season at BFI Southbank at a later date. Additionally, del Toro will deliver masterclasses to young aspiring filmmakers from the BFI Film Academy and visit the BFI National Archive.
In May 2026, the BFI will re-release del Toro’s debut feature, Cronos (1992), recently remastered in 4K by the BFI and Les Films du Camelia, overseen by the director himself.
Background and Recognition
Del Toro is renowned for films including Hellboy (2004), the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Shape of Water (2017), which earned him best director and best picture Oscars, Pinocchio (2022), and his recent Netflix epic Frankenstein (2025), partially shot in the UK at locations such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Salisbury, and Peterborough.
His influences include British cinema, from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927) and Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight (1940) to Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), which inspired The Shape of Water, and Martin Rosen’s Watership Down (1978). As a young projectionist in Mexico, del Toro sourced prints from the BFI National Archive, including for Mexico’s first screening of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.
Del Toro joins esteemed BFI Fellows such as David Lean, Bette Davis, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Tom Cruise, and Tilda Swinton.
Quotes
Guillermo del Toro said: “This is the honor of a lifetime and a thrilling moment in a storyteller’s life: to join a rarefied pantheon and to be recognized by the BFI. I have been greatly influenced by British film and have enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with great talent on both sides of the camera going back decades. I thank everyone at the BFI for this great distinction. I will endeavour myself to work hard to prove myself worthy of their faith in me.”
BFI Chair Jay Hunt commented: “Guillermo del Toro is an extraordinary filmmaker with a long relationship with the BFI who has consistently championed British talent. His collaborations here speak to the strength of our wider screen industries and the skilled people who power them. His body of work is instantly recognisable as boldly imaginative and fantastical. In awarding a BFI Fellowship to Guillermo del Toro, we recognise his remarkable contribution to cinema and the inspiration and magic he has brought to filmmakers and audiences here and around the world.”
