I’ve been covering the BFI London Film Festival for over a decade. Each has been its unique experience—like a combustible reaction, in which the films, their directors, and cast bounce off one another in ways you cannot anticipate. It’s difficult to articulate how 20-plus films emotionally and intellectually affected you. While you can say which films were good or bad, I’ve realized that a film festival’s broader experience is closer to an almost spiritual experience.
Then, there’s the strange vibe of London itself—a world inside a world. London goes on as usual as if indifferent to the London Film Festival, which creates its own little ecosystem within the bustling metropolis. Dare I say it, covering the London Film Festival is like stepping into the wardrobe or stumbling upon Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross Station and venturing into another world.
Fittingly, this year’s 68th BFI London Film Festival‘s opening night film, Blitz, transported audiences into the trauma of Britain’s past. During the wartime evacuation of children, George (Elliott Heffernan), a boy determined not to be separated from his mother, Rita (Ronan), escapes by leaping from the train and begins the dangerous trek home. The elation of the organizers at landing director Steve McQueen’s latest created interest, but once the glitz and the glamour of McQueen and his lead actress Saoirse Ronan walking the red carpet faded, it was an echo of the underwhelming choice from 12-months earlier, when Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn was the opening night gala.
The irony of Blitz is that I enjoyed the experience and yet couldn’t shake a sense of disappointment at McQueen’s struggle to control the emotional rhythm of the drama and the unnecessary Dickensian segment that underused Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke. After recently seeing Ronan’s excellent turn in Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun (2024), I found her performance in Blitz paled in comparison. Nor was the choice of Piece By Piece, Pharrell Williams’ vanity project, co-written and directed by Morgan Neville, as the closing night film cause for much hope. So, this year’s London Film Festival became about what lay between its floundering first and final impressions.
There’s always that group of films that arrive at the London Film Festival off the back of buzz generated by other festivals throughout the year: Berlin, Sundance, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto International Film Festival. Critics are not impervious to what Chief Film Critic of The Boston Globe, Odie Henderson, calls “festival fever”. This happens under pressure to have a lightning-fast response – like a quick-fire round on an afternoon quiz show – which leaves the critic vulnerable to being either too high or low in their assessment of a film.
The Gala strand of the London Film Festival typically houses these talked-about films, like Sean Baker’s Cannes Palm d’Or winning Cinderella story, Anora. Others, for example, Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner, All We Imagine As Light, play in the Special Presentation strand. Then there’s Walter Salles’ true-life forced disappearance drama, I’m Still Here (the director’s first feature film in ten years), and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof‘s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was shot in secret, owing to his legal battles with the Iranian authorities.
I wouldn’t describe Anora as a slow-burn dramatic comedy. Rather, it’s a case of two young people having a lot of sex and spending money, and there’s plenty of arguing. In short, not much seems to happen. The way Anora suddenly flowers later in the story reminds me of Charlotte Wells’ affecting father-daughter drama, After Sun (2022). It’s the type of filmmaking that asks its audience to be patient. As funny as Baker’s story about Ani (Mikey Madison), a stripper who elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch, for the longest time baffled me why this won Cannes most prestigious prize—until Baker constructs a near-perfect final act with brutal honesty.
Kapadia’s humble direction in All We Imagine as Light is equally impressive. The story revolves around the relationship between three nurses: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam). Each have their own dramas. Prabha receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband, stirring up past memories. Anu risks her reputation when she falls in love with a secret boyfriend, while Parvaty is threatened with eviction. Beginning in Mumbai and ending in a quiet beach town, the three women set out on their own journeys of self-discovery while developing deep bonds of friendship.
Kapadia chooses not to expose her characters but instead allows them to reveal themselves. Her use of music instead of words to penetrate her characters’ souls is striking, which contrasts with Walter Salles‘ conservative approach to film language.
This reads as an unintentional criticism. I’m Still Here is aesthetically conservative, but Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres’ captivating performances, alongside Salles’ narrative precision, communicate the reality of time lost and lives irrevocably ripped apart by the violence of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Salles provokes anger and compassion, and learning about the forced disappearance of Rubens Paivas (Mello) and his wife Eunice’s (Torres) struggle to find out what happened to him is impossible to forget.
Other big names in the Gala strand were Edward Berger’s Conclave, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Mike Leigh‘s Hard Truths, and John Crowley’s We Live In Time. I didn’t see Emilia Perez or Hard Truths, and those I saw received a mixed response—one stood out next to Anora as a gem of the Gala strand.
Maria saw Larraín flexing his creative muscles, neglecting to bring any depth to the story of the late, great American-Greek opera soprano Maria Callas. It’s unclear what Larraín’s motivation was, let alone Angelina Jolie, who was let down by a threadbare script. Sure, the music sweeps you up, but where’s Callas’ soul, I ask? One would think the point of a biopic is to find and reveal the person’s soul.
Andrea Arnold creates space in Bird for her audience to enter the film and sense the very soul of her characters. The film revolves around Bailey (Nykiya Adams), whose father Bug (Barry Keoghan) is remarrying. Not too pleased with his choice, Bailey absconds and strikes up a friendship with the unusual Bird (Franz Rigowski). Regrettably, Arnold’s latest fails to resonate or get under the skin in a way that her films can do. It reminds me of that scene in Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys (2000) when Hannah (Katie Holmes) reminds her creative writing tutor, Grady (Michael Douglas), that writers have to make choices. Bird is a social realist drama that experiments with magical realism to mixed success. It may, however, represent an intriguing shift in Arnold’s storytelling—the end of the beginning.
I’ll admit that I was underwhelmed by Edward Berger’s sophomore debut feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Conclave, however, is a more satisfying experience—to a point. The film crackles with the fine performances of its cast (Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow), and Peter Straughan’s script is sharply written, and yet, it comes undone in its desperation for a big concluding moral gesture. The fault isn’t the intention; it’s both the build up to and its eventual delivery that never quite sits right.
Then there are stories like We Live in Time that are often shrouded in a guilty appreciation, if not pleasure. Like the movie melodrama, they are prone to being looked down upon as lacking substance outside the sentimental and overly saccharine pulling on the heart strings. There’s no doubt Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne are pulling on their audiences, but Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s genuine onscreen chemistry, and the script’s finely judged expressions of crisis, finds the most sincerity the genre can ever hope for. Not everyone will agree, and some will see it as an extension of other emotionally exploitative romantic comedy dramas, but in We Live in Time, we are swept up in Almut (Pugh) and Tobias’ (Garfield) story, helped by the non-linear structure that isn’t gimmicked by Crowley or Payne. Instead, it reminds us that two opposing realities can be simultaneously true in that we live our lives non-linearly through our memories.
A sizable chunk of the London Film Festival programme is taken up by around eight themed strands, such as “Dare”, “Love”, “Debate”, “Laugh”, and “Journey”. Then there are the Competition strands, including the Sutherland Award for first feature film. The 11 days are crammed with impossible choices, and it’s those choices that form the unpredictable and unique experience of the 68th BFI London Film Festival.
I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but one day, many years ago, I became hyper-aware of time. Mindfulness and appreciating the moment becomes more difficult—something that’s integral to cinema. At this year’s London Film Festival, the theme that stood out to me was “time”. Callas struggled with her artistic mortality in Maria, while Almut, who was battling a diagnosis of Stage 3 Ovarian Cancer in We Live in Time, declared, “I don’t want to be someone’s dead fucking mum, without something to show.”
Then there’s 15-year-old Fanny (Kaya Toft Loholt), her mother Karin (Maria Rossing) and father Johan (Anders Mossling), who have one last summer together in Danish director Sylvia Le Fanu’s first feature, My Eternal Summer. In director Sasha Nathwani’s Last Swim, Iranian-British teenager Ziba (Deba Hekmat) and her friends hang around the city after collecting their A-level results, waiting for evening to watch the first meteor shower in decades. On the day’s schedule, Ziba, who has put off seeing a doctor and is worried she’ll have to defer her first year at University, has left the space at the end of the day’s schedule blank. But how does she plan to end the day? In Palestinian director Laila Abbas’ Thank You For Banking With Us! Two sisters, frustrated with Islamic inheritance laws, plot to secretly withdraw their inheritance from their father’s bank account, before anyone knows he has passed away, especially their distant brother who the law guarantees half to. Even Anora, in keeping with the Cinderella story, is about time running out, while time is George’s antagonist in Blitz.
It’s fitting to emphasize time in 2024’s Festival, because every story is running out of it. When American biographer and playwright Charlotte Chandler interviewed the great director Billy Wilder, he shared with her a wonderful idea—the audience can continue the film in their imaginations. So, a film has the power to be the end of a beginning, like the characters in so many of the stories that played at this year’s London Film Festival. There’s something comforting, if not magical, in that idea.