Last year, all sorts of birds were seen flying through the movies in the lineup of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF). This year, the festival is getting concrete – literally, and more than once.
In fact, three feature films in the LFF 2026 lineup have the word “concrete” in the title.
“We’ve moved from animals through to inanimate objects or the mineral world,” quips Kristy Matheson, who programs LFF as artistic director, BFI Festivals. “All of these films are incredibly different in their tone and in their subject matter, but they do all have ‘concrete’ in the title. So, it did make for a lot of quite amusing and hilarious and quite confusing program meetings.”
Could the fact that a building material is featuring prominently in several film titles tell us something about the state of cinema and filmmakers’ current priorities? “The idea of getting back to something elemental, that’s something that really started to emerge in the program,” offers Matheson.
So, without further ado, here is a closer look at the three “concrete” titles in the LFF 2026 program.
Concrete Turned to Sand
Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora’s film takes us to oyster farms in Canada. “Shaped by the tidal rhythms of British Columbia’s oyster farms, this richly cinematic documentary, shot on 35mm, exists where labor, scientific inquiry and the living world meet,” highlights the LFF website.
‘Concrete Turned to Sand’
The at-times otherworldly-seeming imagery comes courtesy of Backrooms cinematographer Jeremy Cox.
“We worked with scientists to provide insight into ocean acidification and its impacts, while offering perspectives on the geological timescale of our ecological circumstances,” say Johnson and Ermacora.
Concrete Land
Asmahan Bkerat’s feature directorial debut is an intimate, multi-generational portrait of an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family fighting displacement, racism and hostility in Jordan.
‘Concrete Land’
Courtesy of Asmahan Bkerat
If you are up for an exploration of familial bonds and the importance of home, this one is for you. And get ready to be charmed by the family sheep.
You’ll also get to experience a world we rarely see. “I want people to understand that Bedouin life does not equate to poverty,” Bkerat tells THR. “If you see people living in a tent, that doesn’t mean they are poor.
The History of Concrete
Thanks to his HBO cult show (How to With John Wilson, John Wilson has developed a, well: cult, fan following. In this film, he doesn’t run into a brick wall but explores the concrete jungle of New York and beyond.
The film is more than what its title promises – with all the wit and fun Wilson always brings to his projects. Having attended a Hallmark movie workshop, the filmmaker applies his learnings to a documentary about concrete, albeit with a deceptively understated tone.
Earlier this year, Wilson explained that he wasn’t so interested in the austerity of concrete or “the kind of fascist beauty of it” but “just wanted to get into the actual material which nobody was talking about.” And he added: “I feel concrete was also extremely unsexy.” But it got him into LFF 2026.
