The Mexican filmmaker will be honoured by the BFI with its highest honour.
The BFI has announced that it is honouring filmmaker Guillermo del Toro with a BFI Fellowship.
This award will acknowledge 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.
Del Toro fuses dark horror and gothic fantasy, drawing on folklore, fairytales, literature, sci-fi, religion and comic books to create fantastical cinematic worlds and characters, often monsters and creatures, of deep emotional complexity. Among his works are Hellboy (2004) and multiple Oscar triumphs Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017) and his recent retelling of Frankenstein (2025).
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. In May, the BFI will re-release del Toro’s outstanding debut feature Cronos (1992), recently remastered in 4K by the BFI and Les Films du Camelia, overseen by del Toro and in cinemas UK wide.
In addition, the filmmaker will make a visit to the BFI National Archive as part of the Fellowship celebration. The BFI and del Toro have a long history of collaboration, and he has drawn on the BFI National Archive and British film history as a resource and inspiration for much of his career. 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 profound 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).
Speaking of the news, 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.”
Guillermo del Toro will be joining the distinguished ranks of other BFI Fellows including 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.