BIFA 2025 nominations: Full list of nominees including Jennifer Lawrence's latest acclaimed film
Akinola Davies Jr's widely acclaimed My Father's Shadow – which won't come to UK cinemas until next February – leads the BIFA nominations with 12 nods.
Upcoming Jennifer Lawrence film Die My Love is among the most-nominated movies at the 2025 British Independent Film Awards – the full list of which was announced today (Monday 3rd November).
The Lynne Ramsey-directed film, which also stars Robert Pattinson, received a total of 8 nods across a variety of categories including Best Director and Best Leading performance, putting it fourth in the overall list.
However, the film that leads the way is Akinola Davies Jr's My Father's Shadow, which won't release in UK cinemas until next February. The widely acclaimed film tells story of two brothers who come to understand their father at a pivotal moment in both his life and Nigerian history, and has been nominated in 12 categories.
Those include the top prize of Best British Independent Film, plus Best Director for Davies and Best Screenplay for Davies and his brother and co-writer Wale Davies.
Second on the list is Harry Lighton’s debut feature Pillion, which scored 10 nominations, while third place – with nine nods – goes to Kirk Jones's biographical film I Swear, about Scottish Tourette's awareness activist John Davidson.
Those films both join My Father's Shadow in the frame for the Best British Independent Film prize, while the other two films nominated in that category are bittersweet comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island and Harris Dickinson's directorial debut Urchin.
Meanwhile, Lawrence faces competition from an otherwise all male line-up in the Best Lead Performance category, with the other nominated stars being Robert Aramayo (I Swear), Frank Dillane (Urchin), David Jonsson (Wasteman), Harry Melling (Pillion) and Cillian Murphy (Steve).
There's also only one woman nominated in the Best Supporting Performance category, with Maxine Peake pitted against her I Swear co-stars Peter Mullan and Scott Ellis Watson in addition to Tom Blyth (Wasteman), Jay Lycurgo (Steve) and Alexander Skarsgård (Pillion).
However, there's more gender balance in the Best Breakthrough Performance category, which sees Brides stars Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar nominated alongside Lollipop's Posy Sterling, the aforementioned Scott Ellis Watson of I Swear, and The Son and the Sea's Connor Tompkins.
And as for the Best Joint Performance Category, Vera legend Brenda Blethyn and her Dragonfly co-star Andrea Riseborough are nominated together alongside the aforementioned Brides pair Hassan and Ingar, as well as The Ballad of Wallis Island duo Tim Key and Tom Basden.
It's also already been announced today that this year’s Best Ensemble Performance award will be presented to Warfare, which starred D’Pharaoh Woon-A- Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton.
The full list of nominees is available on the official BIFA website.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
