The UK’s lead organization for film, the British Film Institute, is honouring filmmaker Guillermo del Toro with its highest accolade, a BFI Fellowship.
The award “recognises his extraordinary contribution to film and the distinctive artistry that runs through his work across animation and live action, and as a Mexican filmmaker, in both Spanish and English”.
The BFI will award Guillermo del Toro his BFI Fellowship at the annual BFI Chair’s dinner, hosted by BFI Chair Jay Hunt, in London in May 2026. He will take part in a public Career Conversation at BFI Southbank, where, together with BFI IMAX and on BFI Player, he will also be celebrated with a retrospective, and he will curate a film season at BFI Southbank at a later date. Del Toro will also deliver a series of Masterclasses to a group of young, aspiring filmmakers from the BFI Film Academy.
Del Toro is well known for movies including Hellboy (2004), Oscar winners Pan’s Labyrinth (2006),The Shape of Water (2017) and Pinocchio (2022), and his most recent Netflix epic Frankenstein (2025), which was shot partly in the UK, using locations including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Salisbury and Peterborough.
In May, 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 del Toro.
Del Toro will make a visit to the BFI National Archive as part of the Fellowship celebration. The connection runs deep. As a young projectionist in Mexico, he sourced prints from the BFI National Archive – including for Mexico’s first screening of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. At a TCM event in LA earlier this year that celebrated the BFI National Archive’s 90th Anniversary, del Toro and BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts discussed his love for cinema and the British films and filmmakers who have influenced him, from Alfred Hitchcock and his silent era The Lodger (1927), Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight (1940), Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) – which inspired The Shape of Water, to Martin Rosen’s Watership Down (1978).
BFI Fellows include David Lean, Bette Davis, Akira Kurosawa, Ousmane Sembène, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Orson Welles, Thelma Schoonmaker, Derek Jarman, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu and, most recently, Tilda Swinton, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Prof. Laura Mulvey and Tom Cruise.
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.”
