Mexican director Guillermo del Toro joins the ranks of cinematic greats David Lean, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and Martin Scorsese in receiving the British Film Institute’s highest accolade, the BFI Fellowship.
The BFI announced today that the director of The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth and Frankenstein will receive the honor in recognition of “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 will receive his BFI Fellowship at the annual BFI Chair’s dinner, hosted by BFI chair Jay Hunt, in London in May next year. The director will also take part in a public career conversation at BFI Southbank, will be celebrated with a retrospective of his work, and will curate a film season at BFI Southbank. Del Toro will also deliver a series of masterclasses to a group of young, aspiring filmmakers from the BFI Film Academy and make a special visit to the BFI National Archive as part of the fellowship celebration.
“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,” said del Toro in a statement. “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 endeavor myself to work hard to prove myself worthy of their faith in me.”
Del Toro’s links to the BFI go back to his days as a young projectionist in Mexico when he sourced prints from the BFI National Archives, including securing Mexico’s first screening of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. At a TCM event in L.A. earlier this year that celebrated the BFI National Archive’s 90th Anniversary, del Toro and BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts discussed the British films and filmmakers that have influenced his work, 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 his Oscar-winner The Shape of Water, to Martin Rosen’s animated classic Watership Down (1978).
“Guillermo del Toro is an extraordinary filmmaker with a long relationship with the BFI who has consistently championed British talent,” said BFI Chair Jay Hunt. “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.”
As part of the honor, the BFI in May will re-release del Toro’s debut feature Cronos (1992), his take on the vampire movie, which the BFI and Les Films du Camelia recently remastered in 4K. The film will then roll out in cinemas across the U.K.. Cronos became del Toro’s international calling card. It won nine Ariel awards in Mexico, as well as the grand prize at Cannes Critics Week. It also caught the attention of Miramax, which backed del Toro’s English-language debut, the sci-fi horror movie Mimic (1997).
Del Toro’s long and varied career has included the big-budget comic book adaptations (Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)), and effect-heavy blockbusters (Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015)) but also the Oscar-winning supernatural fantasy dramas Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), and stop motion animation (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022). His most recent feature, a re-interpretation of horror classic Frankenstein, made for Netflix and starring Jacob Elordi, Oscar Issac and Mia Goth, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is considered an awards frontrunner.
Other BFI Fellows have included screen legends Bette Davis, Ousmane Sembène, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Thelma Schoonmaker, Derek Jarman, Satyajit Ray, and Yasujirō Ozu. More recent honorees include Tilda Swinton, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Tom Cruise, and James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson.