72nd National Film Awards 2026: Winners List

The National Film Awards handed out their 72nd edition on 18 July 2026, and the list they produced is already being argued over in every film circle in the country. A political thriller beat a science fiction spectacle to the top prize, two actors from completely different industries were told to share the same trophy, and a former NASA scientist turned director story from over a decade ago suddenly feels relevant again once you notice how often this jury keeps rewarding unconventional paths into filmmaking.

Unlike the glittering film award nights built around advertising slots and popularity votes, the National Film Awards are decided by juries working under the National Film Development Corporation of India and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. There is no red carpet vote, no audience choice category. The jury watches, argues and decides behind closed doors, and this year that process ran through more than four hundred feature film submissions before a single winner was named.

The biggest talking point of the 72nd National Film Awards was not a single winner. It was the jury choosing to split the Best Actor trophy between a mainstream Hindi star and a veteran Malayalam actor picking up his fourth National Award.

How the announcement unfolded

The results had been expected earlier in the month, with several reports pointing to a 3 July 2026 announcement date that came and went without any confirmation from the government. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting eventually called the press conference for 18 July 2026, streamed live through PIB India, with the results read out jointly by Jayaraj as Chairperson of the Feature Film Jury, Aseem Sinha as Chairperson of the Non Feature Film Jury, and A Chandrasekhar as Chairperson of the Best Writing on Cinema Jury. The room stayed packed well past the scheduled hour as category after category was announced. The formal ceremony followed two months later, on 22 September 2026, when President Droupadi Murmu presented the honours at Ekta Nagar in Kevadia, Gujarat, marking the first time in the award's history that the main ceremony was held outside New Delhi.

This edition honours films certified by the Central Board of Film Certification between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024, a rule that has stayed consistent across recent editions and explains why several late 2024 festival titles were held back for the following cycle rather than competing this year. Submissions had actually closed as early as 6 November 2025, meaning the jury spent close to eight months working through the entries before results were made public.

How the winners are actually chosen

Very few people who follow the results every year actually know how they get there, and that gap is part of why this award still feels mysterious even after seven decades. The process starts with an open online call for entries, restricted strictly to films that received CBFC certification within the calendar year being honoured. Nothing dubbed, re edited, reprinted or resubmitted from an earlier cycle qualifies.

For the Feature Film section, the country is divided into five regional zones, each with its own committee made up of one chief and three or four other members who watch every submission from that region first. The chief and one additional member from each of the five regional committees then move up to join the central committee, which this year was chaired by Malayalam filmmaker Jayaraj alongside five further jury members he selected. That eleven person central jury alone decides the actual winners across all twenty six feature film categories, from Best Feature Film down to Best Costume Design. This two tier structure exists specifically so that no single small group of Delhi or Mumbai based jurors ends up deciding what counts as the year's best cinema across twenty four languages.

The Non Feature Film section, which covers sixteen categories including documentaries, short films and animation, runs through a completely separate jury chaired by filmmaker Aseem Sinha, with no crossover in membership to the feature film panels. Best Writing on Cinema has its own dedicated jury as well, made up of critics, historians and academics rather than filmmakers. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award sits outside all of this. It is decided by a specially constituted committee of senior film personalities, often including past recipients of the award themselves, convened specifically for that one honour, which is why its recipient is often announced separately from the rest of the winners list.

The complete winners list

Here is every major category from the 72nd National Film Awards gathered in one place, so you do not have to piece it together from a dozen scattered live blogs.

Category	Winner
Best Feature Film	Article 370
Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment	Kalki 2898 AD
Best Director	Rajkumar Periasamy, Amaran
Best Actor (shared)	Kartik Aaryan, Chandu Champion and Mammootty, Bramayugam
Best Actress	Yami Gautam, Article 370
Best Supporting Actor	Sanjay Mishra, Bhakshak
Best Supporting Actress (shared)	Rupashree Warkade, Mithya and Sachana Namidass, Maharaja
Best Children's Film	35 Chinna Katha Kaadu
Best Debut Film of a Director	Randeep Hooda, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar
Best Original Screenplay	Sukumar, Pushpa 2 The Rule
Best Adapted Screenplay	Yogesh Deshpande, Swaragandharva Sudhir Phadke
Best Dialogue	Venky Atluri, Lucky Bhaskar
Best Cinematography	Shehnad Jalal, Bramayugam
Best Editing	R Kalaivanan, Amaran
Best Music Direction Background Score	GV Prakash Kumar, Amaran
Best Music Direction Songs	Shashwat Sachdev, Article 370
Best Lyrics	Manoj Muntashir, Maidaan
Best Male Playback Singer	Abhay Jodhpurkar, Gharat Ganpati
Best Female Playback Singer	Vaikom Vijayalakshmi, ARM
Best Choreography	Vijay Ganguly, Stree 2

The wins that will define this edition, and why the jury chose them

Article 370 taking the top honour reflects a jury willing to reward a film built around a sensitive and recent political subject, the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, handled through a thriller structure rather than a documentary tone. Its director Aditya Suhas Jambhale and the film's team had already built strong critical goodwill through the year, and the citation praised the film for translating a complex constitutional and security subject into a tightly constructed narrative without losing factual grounding, the same balance of craft and subject matter that has decided this category for over a decade.

The Best Actor tie between Kartik Aaryan and Mammootty is the detail everyone is still discussing. Kartik Aaryan earned his recognition for Chandu Champion, playing Murlikant Petkar, India's first Paralympic gold medallist, under director Kabir Khan. The preparation behind the role is now as well known as the film itself, Aaryan spent fourteen months training under Tridev Pandey and reduced his body fat from thirty nine percent to seven percent, shedding close to eighteen kilograms, a transformation critics and jurors alike pointed to as evidence of genuine commitment rather than a star simply showing up. Mammootty picked up his fourth career National Award for a completely different kind of performance in the black and white horror production Bramayugam, where he carried an almost entirely dialogue driven, single location film on presence and voice work alone. Two actors, two industries, two acting styles, one trophy split between them because the central jury could not agree that either performance was clearly stronger than the other.

Yami Gautam's Best Actress win for the same film that took Best Feature Film is a rare double for a single production, and her citation focused on a performance built more on internal restraint than dramatic outbursts, a quality the jury has favoured in this category across several recent editions over louder, more theatrical performances.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award, decided outside the main jury

Veteran Kannada actor Anant Nag received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2024, India's highest individual honour in cinema, recognising a career spanning more than five decades across Kannada cinema and beyond into other Indian languages. Unlike every other category on this list, the Phalke Award is not decided by the central feature film jury at all. It comes from a specially constituted committee formed only to evaluate lifetime contribution, made up of senior film personalities including past recipients of the award themselves, a structure meant to keep the honour insulated from the same year's competitive categories entirely.

President Droupadi Murmu presented the award to Anant Nag in person at the Ekta Nagar ceremony on 22 September 2026, alongside every other winner named in July. The recipient had already been named earlier in the year, ahead of the general winners announcement, which is a pattern this specific award has followed across most recent editions.

Regional film winners across languages

South Indian cinema had one of its strongest showings in years, with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada productions collecting honours across acting, technical and regional categories. Dhanush had a particularly memorable outing, with his directorial debut Raayan winning Best Tamil Film while Captain Miller, which he also headlined as an actor, picked up a special mention for its sound work.

Regional wins rarely make national headlines the way a Best Actor tie does, yet they usually represent the most technically disciplined filmmaking of the year, made on a fraction of the budget of a single big release song sequence.

Details most coverage left out

A handful of facts around this edition rarely surface once the headline categories are covered, even though they explain a great deal about how the jury was thinking.

Away from the feature film categories, Bhangaar won Best Non Feature Film overall, while Ram Nami was named Best Documentary in a separate category under the same non feature jury, chaired by Aseem Sinha with no overlap in membership with the panel deciding Article 370 or Amaran. The Non Feature Film section alone runs sixteen distinct categories covering documentaries, short films, animation and arts and culture films, a part of the awards that almost never gets mainstream coverage despite representing over a third of the total entries the government received this year.

The central jury chaired by Jayaraj was itself drawn from across the country rather than concentrated in one region, a deliberate structural choice meant to prevent any single film industry from dominating deliberations, a criticism that has followed the awards in past decades when jury composition skewed heavily toward one language industry.

Randeep Hooda's Best Debut Film of a Director win for Swatantrya Veer Savarkar arrived more than a decade after Bedabrata Pain, a former NASA scientist, won the same category for Chittagong at an earlier edition of this award, a reminder that the National Film Awards have a long history of embracing directors who arrive from entirely unconventional backgrounds.

The Best Supporting Actress category was shared this year between Rupashree Warkade for the Kannada courtroom drama Mithya and Sachana Namidass for Maharaja, a joint win that barely registered outside regional entertainment coverage despite both performances anchoring award winning films.

Frequently asked questions

This article is based on the official Press Information Bureau announcement of 18 July 2026 and contemporaneous reporting from Indian entertainment desks, cross checked across multiple sources for accuracy. Last verified 28 July 2026.