European Film Awards 2026 Preview: SIRĀT Holds the Strongest Position in This Year's Race

The European Film Awards conversation offers a snapshot of where European cinema stood in 2025: a production landscape shaped by political fracture, formal permeability, and a renewed confidence in cinema as both ethical inquiry and sensory experience.

Across fiction, documentary, and animation, the year’s most visible works suggest a continent less concerned with consensus aesthetics than with testing the limits of form, authorship, and relevance, often within the same film. A small cluster of films has emerged as the gravitational centre of the race, driven by both the breadth of their recognition and their resonance across disciplines and territories.

At the forefront stands Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s sonic, spiritually inflected Spain–France co-production, which is also Spain's Oscar submission. With strong representation across film, director, screenplay, acting, and a dominant presence in the craft categories, Sirāt reads as the Academy’s most broadly endorsed title this year. Its fusion of metaphysical inquiry and elemental cinematic language positions it as both an auteur statement and a unifying contender.

Close behind is Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s latest collaboration with Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård. Less radical in form but impeccably calibrated in tone, Trier’s film benefits from exceptional actor support, a screenplay nomination shared with long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt, and a strong showing in music and production design. Historically, this kind of emotionally accessible drama has proven highly competitive in the top category.

Germany’s most prominent presence comes via Sound of Falling, which marks Mascha Schilinski’s clear step into the European top tier. Its breadth of nominations, spanning director, screenplay, acting-adjacent crafts, and technical categories, signals institutional confidence. While perhaps less widely seen than Sirāt or Sentimental Value, its cumulative support suggests a potential late-surging consensus favourite.

If those three films represent the Academy’s stabilising axis, several titles complicate the race in more unpredictable ways. Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude occupies a singular position, competing simultaneously as European Film and Documentary. Its ritualistic exploration of isolation and performance culture exemplifies the Academy’s increasing openness to works that resist categorical clarity.

Serra’s film may divide voters, but its very intransigence secures it a lasting presence in the discourse. Similarly straddling form and urgency is Olha Zhurba's Songs of Slow Burning Earth, a Ukrainian-led documentary whose nomination profile reflects Europe’s sustained attention to the war’s long temporal and psychological aftershocks.

Among the most politically charged selections is Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which reconstructs the events of January 29, 2024, when Red Crescent volunteers received an emergency call from a six-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue, and transforms that real-time attempt to keep her alive into an urgent cinematic intervention. While its strongest prospects sit in documentary and sound-related craft recognition, its visibility across categories reinforces the Academy’s alignment with films that confront contemporary violence head-on.

Auteur prestige arrives from a different angle with Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’s return to a more mainstream register. Though it is absent from the main European Film category, its strong presence in director and key craft fields, particularly editing, sound, and score, positions it as a potential spoiler below the top-tier awards and underscores Lanthimos’s enduring institutional capital.

The animated feature lineup offers its own narrative of expansion. Ugo Bienvenu’s Arco emerges as the category’s most internationally visible contender, bridging graphic art sensibilities with accessible storytelling and benefitting from cross-category exposure via the Young Audience Award. In contrast, Irene Iborra Rizo´s Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake and the Central European co-production Tales from the Magic Garden by four directors, Patrik Pašš, David Súkup, Jean-Claude Rozec and Leon Vidmar, exemplify Europe’s growing confidence in animation that speaks simultaneously to children, adults, and arthouse audiences.

Several quieter choices round out the field as genuine wild cards. Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte!, with its interrogation of national mythmaking, has built momentum through documentary recognition. Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl brings historical reckoning into the present, while Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza exemplifies formally radical political cinema.

Here is the complete list of nominations:

European Film:

• AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Spain, France) –  Albert Serra
• ARCO (France) –  Ugo Bienvenu
• DOG OF GOD (Latvia, United States) – Raitis Ābele & Lauris Ābele
• FIUME O MORTE! (Croatia, Slovenia, Italy) – Igor Bezinović
• IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT  (France, Iran, Luxembourg) – Jafar Panahi
• LITTLE AMELIE  (France) – Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han
• OLIVIA AND THE INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE ((Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Chile) – by Irene Iborra Rizo
• RIEFENSTAHL (Germany) – Andres Veiel
• SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Norway, France, Denmark, Germany, Sweden) – Joachim Trier
• SIRĀT (Spain, France) – Oliver Laxe
• SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH ( (Ukraine, France, Denmark, Sweden) – Olha Zhurba
• SOUND OF FALLING (Germany) – Mascha Schilinski
• TALES FROM THE MAGIC GARDEN (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, France) – David Súkup, Patrik Pašš, Leon Vidmar & Jean-Claude Rozec
• THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB (France, Tunisia) – Kaouther Ben Hania
• WITH HASAN IN GAZA (Germany) Kamal Aljafari

European Documentary:

• AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Spain, France) - Albert Serra
• FIUME O MORTE! (Croatia, Slovenia, Italy) -  Igor Bezinović
• RIEFENSTAHL (Germany) - Andres Veiel
• SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH (Ukraine, France, Denmark, Sweden) -  Olha Zhurba
• WITH HASAN IN GAZA (Germany) - Kamal Aljafari 

European Animated Feature Film:

• ARCO (France) - Ugo Bienvenu
• DOG OF GOD (Latvia, United States) - Raitis Ābele & Lauris Ābele.
• LITTLE AMELIE (France) -  Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han
• OLIVIA AND THE INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE (Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Chile) - Irene Iborra Rizo
• TALES FROM THE MAGIC GARDEN (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, France) - David Súkup, Patrik Pašš, Leon Vidmar & Jean-Claude Rozec

European Director:

• Yorgos Lanthimos for BUGONIA
• Oliver Laxe for SIRĀT
• Jafar Panahi for IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
• Mascha Schilinski for SOUND OF FALLING
• Joachim Trier for SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Actress:

• Leonie Benesch in LATE SHIFT
• Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in DUSE
• Léa Drucker in CASE 137
• Vicky Krieps in LOVE ME TENDER
• Renate Reinsve in SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Actor:

• Sergi López in SIRĀT
• Mads Mikkelsen in THE LAST VIKING
• Toni Servillo in LA GRAZIA
• Stellan Skarsgård in SENTIMENTAL VALUE
• Idan Weiss in FRANZ

 European Screenwriter:

• Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe for SIRĀT
• Jafar Panahi for IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
• Mascha Schilinski and Louise Peter for SOUND OF FALLING
• Paolo Sorrentino for LA GRAZIA
• Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier for SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Discovery – Prix FIPRESCI:

• LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS (Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Serbia) -  Urška Djukić
• MY FATHER'S SHADOW (United Kingdom, Nigeria) -  Akinola Davies Jr
• ON FALLING (United Kingdom, Portugal) - Laura Carreira
• ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHEN HEMME DİES (Turkey, Germany) -  Murat Fıratoğlu
• SAUNA (Denmark) -  Mathias Broe
• UNDER THE GREY SKY (Poland) - Mara Tamkovich

European Young Audience Award:

• ARCO (France) -  Ugo Bienvenu
• I ACCIDENTALLY WROTE A BOOK  (Hungary, Netherlands) - Nóra Lakos
• SIBLINGS (Italy) - Greta Scarano

European Casting Director

• Nadia Acimi, Luís Bértolo and María Rodrigo for SIRĀT
• Karimah El-Giamal and Jacqueline Rietz for SOUND OF FALLING
• Yngvill Kolset Haga and Avy Kaufman for SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Cinematographer

• Manu Dacosse for THE STRANGER
• Fabian Gamper for SOUND OF FALLING
• Mauro Herce for SIRĀT

European Composer (Original Score)

• Jerskin Fendrix for BUGONIA
• Michael Fiedler and Eike Hosenfeld for SOUND OF FALLING
• Hania Rani for SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Costume Designer

• Michaela Horáčková Hořejší for FRANZ
• Sabrina Krämer for SOUND OF FALLING
• Ursula Patzak for DUSE

European Editor

• Cristóbal Fernández for SIRĀT
• Toni Froschhammer for DIE MY LOVE
• Yorgos Mavropsaridis for BUGONIA

European Make-up & Hair Artist

• Gabriela Poláková for FRANZ
• Irina Schwarz & Anne-Marie Walther for SOUND OF FALLING
• Torsten Witte for BUGONIA

European Production Designer

• Laia Ateca for SIRĀT
• James Price for BUGONIA
• Jørgen Stangebye Larsen for SENTIMENTAL VALUE

European Sound Designer

• Johnnie Burn for BUGONIA
• Laia Casanovas for SIRĀT
• Gwennolé Le Borgne, Marion Papinot, Lars Ginzel, Elias Boughedir and Amal Attia for THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB

The 38th edition of European Film Awards will take place on January 17, 2026, in Berlin.