Summary
- BIFA 2026 has named five nominees for Best Cinematography.
- Andrew Scott’s Elsinore leads the awards with 12 nominations.
- I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning follows with eight and Animol with seven.
- The cinematography winner will be announced on 24 November, ahead of the 6 December ceremony.
Five cinematographers are in contention for Best Cinematography at the 2026 British Independent Film Awards, with Andrew Scott’s Elsinore leading the overall nominations.
The nominations were announced in London on 3 November. Elsinore received 12 nominations, followed by I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning with eight and Animol with seven.
The five Best Cinematography nominees
The category brings together five different productions and puts the filmmakers responsible for their visual storytelling in the spotlight:
- Mike Eley BSC — Elsinore
- Piers McGrail ISC — Everybody Digs Bill Evans
- Christopher Ripley — Straight Circle
- Simon Tindall — I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
- André Turpin — A Long Winter
Cinematography is creative work: decisions about lighting, framing, camera movement and visual continuity that serve the story. Recognition of the cinematographer’s role is also a live conversation in Greece, as the president of the Greek Society of Cinematographers (GSC) discusses in an interview about awards and authorship.
Andrew Scott’s Elsinore leads the field
Andrew Scott portrays Scottish actor Ian Charleson as he prepares to play Hamlet at London’s National Theatre while facing serious illness. Simon Stone directs the film, Stephen Beresford wrote the screenplay, and Mike Eley is its director of photography.
Alongside cinematography, Elsinore is nominated for Best British Independent Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Lead Performance for Scott, among other categories. Seven of its nominations are in craft disciplines.
Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, a story about five friends in Birmingham, ranks second by total nominations, while Animol is Ashley Walters’s feature directorial debut.
When the cinematography winner will be announced
The BIFA craft winners, including Best Cinematography, will be announced on 24 November 2026. The main awards ceremony follows on 6 December 2026 at London’s Roundhouse.
What we think
If you work with cameras and light, this is a shortlist worth saving. It offers more than a ranking of films: five cinematographers to look for in the credits and five pieces of work worth watching closely.
A cinematography award matters when it moves some of the attention away from the lead actor and director to the people who decide how a story is told through the camera. It is an invitation to compare different visual approaches without judging a whole film from a poster or a single frame.
With Elsinore attracting so much attention around Andrew Scott, seeing Mike Eley’s name alongside the nomination is a useful reminder of how collaborative moving-image storytelling is. Awards coverage benefits when those contributions are made visible.
