Loznitsa's Imperium wins best film at the London Film Festival

Sergei Loznitsa's documentary Imperium has won the best film award at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, which closed at the weekend.

The film, by a director known for reconstructing history from archive footage, looks at the Soviet Union through the eyes of Italian cameramen who filmed everyday life there in the early 1970s.

"Richly evocative"

The official competition jury, led by the American documentary maker Sam Pollard, said: "Imperium is an extraordinary film that explores the Soviet Union in the early 1970s from a rich archive with a wide-ranging perspective that looks at life in a country with an extraordinary social and cultural landscape that has rarely been seen."

"The film is richly evocative and emotionally engaging on all levels, giving us a visually arresting perspective of life before the Soviet Union was broken apart. Our jury is immensely proud to honour such a powerful and singular piece of work."

The other winners

The Sutherland award for the best first feature went to 9 Temples to Heaven, the fiction debut of the Thai film-maker Sompot Chidgasornpongse, which the jury called "visually outstanding, spiritual and meditative", a story about life and death that "transcends borders and generations". The jury gave a special mention to Masc, Bertil Nilsson's debut about a young man moving between temporary jobs and relationships, which it called "a strikingly original new voice in British cinema".

The Grierson award for the best documentary went to Concrete Land, Asmahan Bkerat's debut feature, an intimate portrait of a mixed-race family facing displacement and hostility in Jordan. The jury said it was "deeply relevant to see the quiet resilience and dignity of this family in the face of the erasure of their culture and traditions". A special mention went to Queer Edward II, Theo Rollason's archive portrait of Derek Jarman making his film Edward II against the backdrop of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in 1980s Britain.

The short film award went to Rahul Roye's Aman, about a trans man who discovers he is pregnant on the eve of gender-affirming surgery. The jury praised its "painterly cinematography" and its "refusal to provide easy answers". Aman can be watched free on BFI Player until 25 October. Elizabeth Hobbs's animated Daughters of the Late Colonel received a special mention.

Audience awards still to come

This year's jury presidents were Sam Pollard, the actor Amir El-Masry, the director Sandhya Suri and Helen Simmons. Voting for the festival's audience awards, for best feature and best British discovery, closes on Wednesday 21 October, with the winners to be announced later. Last year the audience prizes went to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet and to Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story.

The London Film Festival, run by the British Film Institute and centred on BFI Southbank, is the UK's biggest film festival, screening hundreds of features and shorts each October. Many of its films go on to be shown around the country, and independent cinemas in Birmingham regularly pick up festival favourites in the months that follow.

Loznitsa, who was born in Belarus and grew up in Ukraine, has made a series of acclaimed archive films about the Soviet era, piecing together long-forgotten footage to tell history in a new way.