Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is to receive a BFI Fellowship, the organisation’s highest accolade.
His career spans Hellboy (2004), multiple Oscar wins for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape Of Water (2017), and a recent retelling of Frankenstein for Netflix, which premiered at Venice and shot partly in the UK in locations including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Salisbury and Peterborough.
The BFI will award del Toro his fellowship at the annual BFI chair’s dinner, hosted by BFI chair Jay Hunt, in London in May 2026. He will also take part in a public career conversation at BFI Southbank and will be celebrated with a retrospective at BFI Imax and on BFI Player.
The filmmaker will curate a film season at the BFI Southbank at a later date and deliver a series of masterclasses to a group of young, aspiring filmmakers from the BFI Film Academy. In May, the BFI will re-release del Toro’s debut feature Cronos (1992), recently remastered in 4K, in UK cinemas.
He joins the ranks of Tilda Swinton, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Prof. Laura Mulvey and Tom Cruise, all recent recipients of BFI Fellowships.
“This is the honour of a lifetime and a thrilling moment in a storyteller’s life: to join a rarefied pantheon and to be recognised by the BFI,” said del Toro. “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.”
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