(An overview off the 68th BFI London Film Festival)
The 68th BFI London Film Festival runs from 9-20 October at various venues across the capital. As ever, the programme is exciting and eclectic, with the 253 titles on offer including features, shorts, series, and immersive works. In all, 79 countries and 63 languages are represented, with 44% of the slate being directed by female and non-binary artists. Fifteen features will receive their world premieres, while another six are so-called `international' premieres and 17 are European debuts.
Once again, the programme has been divided into themed sections, although there are also separate competitions for the best first film and best documentary (the winner of which will receive the coveted Sutherland Trophy). But most attention will be focussed on the latest releases by the biggest names on the roster and the red carpet seems like a reasonable place to start.
GALAS.
Little fuss was made of the 85th anniversary of Britain declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939. But the Opening Night Gala at London 2024 evokes the wartime spirit, as Steve McQueen's Blitz follows in the footsteps of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's Millions Like Us (1943) and David Lean's This Happy Breed (1944) in detailing how ordinary people coped with the terrifying calamity of total warfare. At the centre of the story is nine year-old George (Elliott Heffernan), who decides that evacuation to the country isn't for him and makes his way back to mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in Stepney Green after disembarking from his train.
The Closing Night selection is Morgan Neville's Piece By Piece, which boldly uses LEGO animation to chart the career of Pharrell Williams. Starting in his Virginia Beach garage and touching upon Williams's role in the band N.E.R.D. and the producing duo The Neptunes, this innovative profile also examines collaborations with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Daft Punk, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, and Snoop Dogg.
Continuing the musical theme of the Galas selection, R.J. Cutler and David Furnish use concerts in Dodger Stadium in 1975 and 2023 to assess the career of a flamboyant, gifted, and often conflicted musical superstar in Elton John: Never Too Late. A diva of another sort comes under scrutiny in Pablo Larraín's Maria, as Angelina Jolie and Aggelina Papadopoulou share the role of opera singer Maria Callas, as she wanders around Paris in reflective mood towards the end of her life with aspiring film-maker named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The boldest of the musical picks, however, has to be Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, a pop opera set amongst the drug cartels of Mexico that follows the efforts of Juan `Manitas' del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) to quit a life of crime and fulfil their destiny by becoming the first love who had been killed years before. Lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) helps stage the fake death. But things get trickier when Emilia asks her to bring widow Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children to Switzerland when she is readying to start afresh with Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez).
Embarking upon an unlikely new life is also the theme of Sean Baker's Anora, as a Brighton Beach lap dancer (Mikey Madison)is swept off her feet when client Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) proposes marriage. However, he's a Russian oligarch, whose parents wholly disapprove of the match. This Palme d'or winner would make a quirky double bill with John Crowley's We Live in Time, a non-linear love story that pivots around a chance encounter between chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and desk jockey Tobias (Andrew Garfield).
Motherhood is a key theme of LFF68 and the sacrifices made by women after they give birth are laid out in surreally satirical terms in Nightbitch, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Rachel Yoder's bestselling novel that sees Mother (Amy Adams) finding raising a four year-old in the suburbs a trial, even when Father (Scoot McNairy) can be bothered to help. One wonders how she would view Ben Taylor's Joy, which recalls the pioneering efforts of surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), scientist Robert Edwards (James Norton), and nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie) to create the world's first test tube baby.
Sticking in the realm of biopics, director Ali Abbasi and journalist Gabriel Sherman head back to 1973 in The Apprentice to see how Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) fell under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the lawyer who had terrorised Hollywood during the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's inquiry into Communism in the entertainment industry. Power and how to exploit and corrupt also lies at the heart of Edward Berger's Conclave, an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel that sees Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) learn from friend Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), during the election process for a new pope, that the previous encumbent of the Throne of St Peter had a dark secret that could shake the foundations of the Roman Catholic Church.
A strained relationship provides the starting point for The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language feature, which has been adaptated from Sigrid Nunez's novel, What Are You Going Through, and follows the efforts of art expert Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to reconnect with Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war correspondent and single mother, who is undergoing experimental treatment for cervical cancer. Mental and physical pain are also at the core of Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, as Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) blames the world for the misanthropy that alienates everyone but partner Curtley (David Webber), son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and sister Chantelle (Michele Austin).
Seeing Leigh return to the kind of kitchen sink scenario with which his career started half a century ago, this typically amusing slice of life contrasts with the uncompromising approach taken by Andrea Arnold in Bird. More interested in his tattoos than kids Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and Hunter (Jason Buda), Bug (Barry Keoghan) inhabits a squat in North Kent. When he announces he's about to marry a woman he's known for a couple of months, 12 year-old Bailey rebels and decides to help a mysterious stranger named Bird (Franz Rogowski) find his biological father.
If this could be described as a Dardenne fairytale, the magic feels more traditional in Simon Otto's That Christmas, an animated charmer scripted by Richard Curtis and Peter Souter from the former's children's books, The Empty Stocking, Snow Day, and That Christmas. Brian Cox voices Santa (Brian Cox), as he seeks to atone for a blunder that causes the residents of a seaside town to appreciate the true meaning of the season. Bill Nighy, Brian Cox, Guz Khan, Fiona Shaw, Jodie Whittaker, and Lolly Adefope are among the revellers, while Curtis's Suffolk neighbour, Ed Sheeran, has contributed the song, `Under the Tree'.
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS.
Seemingly not quite worth a gala, but still replete with big names and compelling themes, the films in this section are likely to wind up in UK cinemas over the next few months.
Adapted from a novel by William S. Burroughs, Luca Guadagnino's Queer is bound to make headlines, as Daniel Craig takes the role of William Lee, the expat American author who becomes obsessed with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) while living in Mexico City. While awards gossip vaunts Craig's bold performance, there will be less buzz around the acting in Roshan Sethi's A Nice Indian Boy. But Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff still impress as doctor Naveen and his photographer boyfriend, Jay, as they seek to convince a conventional Desi community in California to embrace their forthcoming wedding.
Mumbai provides the setting for Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Tempering realism with surreal episodes, the story follows hospital nurses Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), as they seek an escape from the problems of daily life by accompanying colleague Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) on a trip to her home village on the coast. While an absentee husband drives a subplot here, the sudden disappearance of a politician father (Selton Mello) in 1971 Rio de Janeiro sparks the action in Walter Salles's fact-based I'm Still Here, as mother Eunice (Fernanda Torres) is forced to reinvent herself in order to protect her five children as the military dictatorship clamps down on opposition.
Civil unrest is resisted with similar brutality in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig, as a Tehran woman (Soheila Golestani) and her two daughters (Setareh Malek and Mahsa Rostami) help an injured anti-hijab protester, even though the head of their household (Missagh Zareh) is an investigating magistrate, who blames them for the fact his gun has gone missing. A cruel system also comes under scrutiny in RaMell Ross's Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel that pitches bogusly charged Tallahassee student Elwood (Ethan Herisse) into a racist reform school where his hopes of survival depend on his friendship with fellow Black inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson).
A very different take on African American life is provided by Malcolm Washington's August Wilson adaptation, The Piano Lesson, which is set in Pittsburgh in 1936 and follows the efforts of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson) to referee a feud, as Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) opposes a plan by her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), to sell a piano etched with carvings of the family's history in order to purchase a plot of post-Depression land. The bickering is between cousins in Jesse Eisenberg's sophomore outing, A Real Pain, as David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) fall out on a trip to Poland to honour the memory of the beloved grandmother who had survived the Holocaust.
The grandma is very much still alive in Charlie McDowell's The Summer Book, an adaptation of a Tove Jansson book that sees Glenn Close take eight year-old Emily Matthews to an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Finland. The island in Chris Sanders's The Wild Robot lies off the Pacific Northwest and is inhabited by the animals, who welcome castaway robot, Rozzum Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong'o). Having rescued a goose egg from Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal), Roz finds herself having to tease a gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) how to fly south for the winter.
A bucolic idyll is threatened in Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari's English-language debut, Harvest, as cartographer Earle (Arinzé Kene) arrives on land that the unscrupulous Jordan (Frank Dillane) hopes to obtain from his cousin, Master Kent (Harry Melling), the lord of the manor who is friends with taciturn villager, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones). Marine archaeologist Mensun Bound is the man on a mission in Endurance, a documentary directed by Jimmy Chin, Natalie Hewit, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi that heads to the Weddell Sea in search of the ship on which Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed to Antarctica in 1914.
Another expedition forms part of the collage in artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's directorial debut, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, as André Breton (Josué Gutierrez) travels to Vichy Martinique to visit Suzanne (Zita Hanrot), the writer wife of poet-politician, Aimé Césaire (Motell Foster). France's colonial past is also central to Mati Diop's Dahomey, which chronicles how 26 artworks on display in the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac were repatriated to Benin, the modern successor to the Kingdom of Dahomey, which had been incorporated into French West Africa.
OFFICIAL COMPETITION.
There's a rustic feel to four of the features in the Official Competition. The Georgian countryside provides the setting for Dea Kulumbegashvili's April, as provincial chauvinism and a suspicion of progress makes life difficult for gynaecologist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who is being investigated by her former partner (Kakha Kintsurashvili) after a complaint is made following a baby's death. The vastness of the steppe is also in evidence in Gabrielle Brady's documentary, The Wolves Always Come At Night, which reveals the impact of climate change on Mongolian couple, Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg, who decide to relocate to the nearest town after being forced to abandon their traditional lifestyle.
Change also comes to an Italian mountain village on the German border at the end of the Second World War in Maura Delpero's Vermiglio, as Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), the daughter of schoolteacher Cesare (Tommaso Ragno), falls for Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), the shell-shocked deserter hiding in the barn. The power of the patriarch is also evident in Christopher Andrews's Bring Them Down, as the tensions between Irish sheep farmers Ray (Colm Meaney) and Gary (Paul Ready) are passed down to their respective sons, Michael (Christopher Abbott) and Jack (Barry Keoghan).
A very different slant on family life is provided by Darren Thornton's Four Mothers, as the scene shifts to Dublin for a reworking of Gianni Di Gregorio's sublime Mid-August Lunch (2008) that shows how gay novelist James McArdle deals over the course of a weekend with aged mother Fionnula Flanagan and her eccentric friends, Niamh Cusack, Dearbhla Molloy, and Stella McCusker. Thanks to the wondrously rebellious Pinky (Jacki Weaver), a similar wit and warmth also permeate Oscar winner Adam Elliot's Memoir of a Snail, a stop-motion chronicle set in 1970s Australia that took eight years took make and explores how Gracie Pudel (Sarah Snook) fared when she was orphaned and separated from her twin, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), in order to move in with a sexually liberated couple in Canberra.
A death also proves to have momentous repercussions in sophomore Rungano Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, as cousins Shula (Susan Chardy) and Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) try to coax their Zambian family into accepting the abusive truth about an uncle found dead at the side of the road. Confrontration is also in the air in Laila Abbas's Thank You For Banking With Us!, as squabbling sisters Noura (Yasmine Al Massri) and Mariam (Clara Khoury) put aside their differences to find away around the Sharia Law tenets that could prevent them from inheriting their father's fortune.
Father Roman (Roman Lutskyi) hopes that a holiday in Tenerife will allow his children to get to know their new stepmother Nastya (Anastasiia Karpienko) in Damian Kocur's Under the Volcano. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine means they aren't able to return to Kyiv and the rumbling Mount Teide becomes an ominously familiar sight in this study of the precariousness of existence. A change of scene similarly fails to bring the expected benefits in Mipo O's Living in Two Worlds, as 20 year-old Dai Igarashi (Ryo Yoshizawa) tires of interpreting for his deaf parents and leaves his small port hometown in Miyagi prefecture for Tokyo.
Not quite knowing what to expect will enhance the enjoyment of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's The Extraordinary Miss Flower, a creative spin on the biopic has been described as `part film, part theatre, part fever dream'. At its heart is Icelandic singer-songwriter Emilíana Torrini, who recorded an album based on the suitcase full of letters from the 1960s and 70s that has also inspired readings and dramatic recreations featuring Caroline Catz, Richard Ayoade, Nick Cave, Alice Lowe, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
FIRST FEATURE.
Renowned for her work in the films of Athina Rachel Tsangari and husband Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek-French actress Ariane Labed is the most familiar name among those competing for the First Feature Award. Drawing on Daisy Johnson's novel, Sisters, September Says sees artist Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar) become concerned when September (Pascale Kann) is expelled from school and her younger 15 year-old sister, July (Mia Tharia), makes a concerted bid to emerge from her shadow.
Anyone fortunate enough to have seen Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus will know the musician's director son, Neo Sora. He turns to fiction with Happyend, which examines the impact of a catastrophic earthquake in a futuristic Tokyo on childhood friends, Kou (Yukito Hidaki) and Yuta (Hayao Kurihara), who were part of a boisterous school clique with Tomu (Arazi), Ming (Shina Peng), and Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi). Tunisian-Canadian director Meryam Joobeur may well also be known to some, as she received an Oscar nomination for her 2018 short, Brotherhood. She graduates to features with Who Do I Belong To, which explores how Tunisian farmers Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui) and Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) react when their son, Mehdi (Malek Mechergui), returns from a failed bid to fight for ISIS with a pregnant, niqab-wearing wife named Reem (Dea Liane).
A graduate of the National Film and Television School, Sandhya Suri earned a BAFTA nomination for her 2018 short, The Field, which followed on from the feature documentaries, I For India (2006) and Around India With a Movie Camera (2018), which respectively made use of home movies and BFI archival footage of British India. Her feature bow, Santosh, has already been selected to represent Britain in the Best International Film category at the 2025 AcademyAwards. It centres on Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), a 28 year-old widow in Northern India, who inherits her late husband's job as a police officer and finds herself alongside Inspector Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) investigating the caste killing of a rape victim.
Also coming to features after a successful shorts career is Laura Carreira, a Portuguese film-maker based in Edinburgh, who was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA for Red Hill (2018) and landed a European Film Awards nod for The Shift (2020). She has already picked up the Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastian Film Festival for her debut feature, On Falling, which centres on
Aurora (Joana Santos), who has a crush on her housemate Kris (Piotr Sikora), but is slowly succumbing to the numbing and dehumanising ennui as a picker at an online warehouse.
DOCUMENTARY.
Elizabeth Sankey trawls through screen history to discuss the relationship between the depiction of witches on screen and postpartum depression in Witches, which is among the films competing for the Sutherland Trophy.
Also in the running are Collective Monologue, Jessica Sarah Rinland's study of zoos and animal rescue centres in Argentina; Ilyas Yourish and Shahrokh Bikara's Kamay, which follows an Afghan family seeking justice after the tragic death of their student daughter; Mother Vera, Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson's profile of an Orthodox nun in Belarusian convent; Rising Up At Night, Nelson Makengo's snpshot of nightlife in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Jazmin Renée Jones's Seeking Mavis Beacon, which seeks to track down the model on the cover of a 1980s software package that taught millions to type.
CREATE.
Sixty years have passed since John Lennon first set foot in America. However, his return in 1972 proved to be an equally significant turning point in a life that was to end just eight years later. Director Kevin Macdonald recalls how Lennon and Yoko Ono found a new home in Manhattan in the run up to the famous One to One concerts in One to One: John & Yoko. Paul McCartney and Pattie Boyd are among the famous faces paying tribute to another Swinging Sixties icon in Sadie Frost's Twiggy, which chronicles how Lesley Hornby became a Dame of the British Empire.
Forty-two minutes is all it takes French director Leos Carax (an anagram of his real name, Alex Oscar) to reflect on his life and works like Mauvais Sang (1986), Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991), and Holy Motors (2012) in the Godardian selfie, It's Not Me. Malaysian maestro Tsai Ming-liang also keeps things short in Abiding Nowhere, the tenth film in the `Walker' series that follows crimson-robed Buddhist monk Lee Kang-sheng on a sedate tour of Washington, DC.
Also on the Create slate are:- Raoul Peck's Ernest Cole, Lost and Found; Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane's Grand Theft Hamlet; Jane Mingay's Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story; Reema Kagti's Superboys of Malegaon; Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter's Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other; Adam Wong's The Way We Talk; and The Stimming Pool, which was co-directed by Sam Ahern, Georgia Kumari Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Steven Eastwood, Robin Elliot-Knowles, and Lucy Walker.
CULT.
The Nicolas Cage surfing movie that none of us knew we needed (even though we so did) breaks on the shingle of LFF68. Irish director Lorcan Finnegan calls the shots in The Surfer, as an unnamed office drone comes to Lunar Bay to ride the waves and rile the locals who don't like outsiders on their turf or surf. Echoes of Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968) can be heard, but the film wouldn't have turned out the way it did if Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) helped change attitudes to screen violence. Half a century on, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Karyn Kusama, and Stephen King help ace cine-documentarist Alexandre O. Philippe assess the slasher's influence in
Chain Reactions.
Abetted by producer and script consultant Céline Sciamma, actress Noémie Merlant puts a feminist slant on screen violence in
The Balconettes, as online sex worker Ruby (Souheilia Yacoub), budding novelist Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) and actress Elise (Merlant) regret accepting an invitation to join a hunky courtyard neighbour (Lucas Bravo) for a cooling drink during a Marseille heatwave.
Completing the Cult line-up are:- Marco Dutra's Bury Your Dead; Aislinn Clarke's Fréwaka; Karan Kandhari's Sister Midnight; Pedro Martín-Calero's The Wailing; and Daniel Emeke Oriahi's The Weekend.
DARE.
Romanian provocateur Radu Jude joins forces with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz for Eight Postcards From Utopia, a found footage documentary that seeks to trace the history of the post-Ceaușescu transition from socialism to capitalsm through television commercials. Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke raids his own archives for the imagery used to piece together the relationship between Zhao Tao and the unreliable Li Zhubin in Caught By the Tides. In addition to repurposing documentary footage caught on a range of cameras, Jia also includes outtakes from previous features made over two decades.
During this same period, Pennsylvania-born, London-based twins, Stephen and Timothy Quay, have been pondering the writings of Polish author Bruno Schulz, whose work influenced their 1986 short, Street of Crocodiles. Blending stop-motion and stylised live-action, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass begins in an auction house, where a Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina proves key to the odyssey of a 1937 man named Josef (Andrzej Klak) to the Sanatorium Karpaty in the Carpathians Mountains, where his aged father is dying.
Compellingly, Belgian Johan Grimonprez employs what might be called `found sound' in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat to provide a jazz background to the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the first post-independence prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, whose assassination prompted jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach to protest at the United Nations in February 1961.
Rounding off the Dare selection are:- Yoel Morales's Bionico's Bachata; Juliana Rojas's Cidade; Campo; Giovanni Tortorici's Diciannove; Duong Dieu Linh's Don't Cry, Butterfly; Sarah Friedland's Familiar Touch; Marta Mateus's Fire of Wind; Julia De Simone's Formosa Beach; Farahnaz Sharifi's
My Stolen Planet; Inadelso Cossa's The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder; Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias's Pepe; Johanne Gomez Terrero's Sugar Island; and Truong Minh Quý's Viet and Nam.
DEBATE.
A decade after Maidan (2014), Sergei Loznitsa returns to his homeland for The Invasion to show how ordindary Ukrainians are coping in the face of Russian aggression. Shot by small units over two years, the 30 vignettes have been edited by the director and Danielius Kokanauskis. Brita Norell does an equally impressive job on Göran Hugo Olsson's found footage study, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, which shows how events in this tinderbox region were covered by the state monopoly channel, STV.
Comments on the ongoing situation have put Asif Kapadia in the headlines at the start of LFF 2024. But his focus is on the future in 2073, a treatise on everything from climate change to corporate greed and the crisis of democracy that pitches Samantha Morton into a wasteland in the manner of Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962). A book by Nevenka Fernández and Juan José Millás provides the inspiration for Icíar Bollaín's I Am Nevenka, a #MeToo drama that charts how a former mayor (Urko Olazabal) exploits his position to force himself upon a student (Mireia Oriol) working in a financial role on the countil of her hometown, Ponferrada.
Adding to the Debate are:- Shiori Ito's Black Box Diaries; Kazuhiro Sôda's The Cats of Gokogu Shrine; Leonardo van Dijl's Julie Keeps Quiet; Jordan Tannahill's The Listeners; Emanuel Parvu's Three Kilometres to the End of the World; and Wang Bing's Youth (Homecoming).
JOURNEY.
Continuing from The Act of Killing (2012) to explore the refusal of the culpable to take responsibility for their action, Joshua Oppenheimer's fictional debut, The End, is set in a post-apocalyptic bunker deep in a salt mine and centres on former energy executive Michael Shannon, wife Tilda Swinton, and son George MacKay, who has never known anything other than life underground and raises some awkward questions when he meets female interloper, Moses Ingram. What makes this sobering scenario so unusual is the fact that it's a musical. The debuting Anne-Sophie Bailly also focusses on a mother-son relationship in My Everything, as Mona (Laure Calamy) discovers that disabled son Joël (Charles Peccia) is expecting a baby with Océane (Julie Froger), who works at the same specialised facility.
In Finn Mikko Mäkelä's sophomore picture, Sebastian, 25 year-old aspiring novelist Max (Ruaridh Mollica) adopts a new name and travels to London to become a sex worker in order to find material for the book his publishers hope will make him a media star. Clark Kent's double life is markedly less sordid. But the actor who played him in Richard Donner's Superman (1978) did become an overnight celebrity, only for a tragic riding accident to confront him with a new reality as a campaigner for quadriplegic issues, as documentarists Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui recall in Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.
Also making the Journey are:- Damien Hauser's After the Long Rains; Fleur Fortune's The Assessment; Marcelo Caetano's
Baby; Carson Lund's Eephus; Justin Kurzel's Ellis Park; Gints Zilbalodis's Flow; India Donaldson's Good One; Amrou Al-Kadhi's Layla; Lana Wilson's Look Into My Eyes; Min Bahadur Bham's Shambhala; Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez's Sujo; Gino Evans's Treading Water; and Mo Harawe's The Village Next to Paradise.
LAUGH.
A good claim could be made that, when it comes to film directors, South Korea's Hong Sang-soo is the best in the world at what he does. He reunites with Isabelle Huppert for the third time in A Traveler's Needs, which sees Iris seek solace in glasses of makgeolli after she loses her job and hits upon a novel way of teaching French to the piano-playing Isong (Kim Seun-gyun) and the older, more sceptical Wonju (Lee Hye-young). Things also get a bit awkward when Madrid film-maker. Ale (Itsaso Arana), and her actor boyfriend of 14 years, Alex (Vito Sanz), bemuse their friends by holding a break-up party in Jonás Trueba's The Other Way Around.
A gathering of a more momentous kind comes under the spotlight in Rumours, which has been co-directed by Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, and Evan Johnson. Cate Blanchett plays the German chancellor attending a G7 summit, while her companions stranded in a bizarre woodland gazebo represents the United States (Charles Dance), Britain (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Canada (Roy Dupuis), Italy (Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet), and Japan (Takehiro Hira).
Also seeking to raise a Laugh are:- Natalie Bailey's Audrey; Isaiah and Yassir Lester's The Gutter; The Thiele Brothers's Sofa, So Good; Grozeva and Petar Valchanov's Triumph; and Matthew Rankin's Universal Language.
LOVE.
The ever-reliable François Ozon views love from a unique perspective in When Fall Is Coming, as he explores the friendship in a picturesque Burgundian village of Michelle (Hélène Vincent) and Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), who respectively dote on their adorable grandson (Garlan Erlos) and imprisoned son, Vincent (Pierre Lotin). Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots have been besties since uni in William Bridges's All of You. So, even though he adores her, Goldstein accompanies Poots to a Soul Connex session that determines that her soulmate is the nice, but dull Steve Cree.
Another triangle lies at the heart of Rúnar Rúnarsson's When the Light Breaks, as art student Una (Elín Hall) mourns the sudden death of Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), the best friend with whom she was having a secret romance, even though he had a long-distance girlfriend in Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir). Separated partners also dominate Miguel Gomes's Grand Tour, a colonial satire that sees minor British functionary Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) flee Rangoon before the arrival of his seven-year fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), and hop furtively between Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, and Shanghai, as the Great War rages in Europe.
Coming forward to 2005, nothing is going to prevent Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura) from falling into a reckless romance with punk icon Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) after they meet at the Stars in the Making singing competition. But passion has its consequences over the course of the next quarter century in Alexis Langlois's Queens of Drama. A musical odyssey of a `legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliche, illogical' kind is supervised by Alex Ross Perry in Pavements, which chronicles the career of the 1990s indie band, Pavement, using archive footage, dramatic reconstruction, and snippets from the 2022 stage show, Slanted! Enchanted!
In a more traditional vein, Nicolas Philibert follows On the Adamant (2023) with At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which continues his tribute to the Central Psychiatric Group in Paris by capturing everyday activity on two wards at the Esquirol Hospital Centre.
Also looking for a little Love are:- Ray Yeung's All Shall Be Well; Kimberly Reed's I'm Your Venus; Victoria Mapplebeck's Motherboard; Ted Passon's Patrice: The Movie; Dag Johan Haugerud's Sex; Milko Lazarov's Tarika; and Sara Fgaier's Weightless.
THRILL.
A true-life crime lies behind Fabrice du Welz's Maldoror, which sees Belgian cop Anthony Bajon become frustrated by the inactivity of boss Laurent Lucas after he is detailed to monitor Sergi López, the paedophile thought to be responsible for the disappearance of two girls. Another missing person proves key to Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia, which accompanies Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) to his home village of Saint-Martial for the funeral of his former baker boss, whose widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), offers him a room during his stay, which is complicated by his relationships wih her son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), and his rotund, loner friend, Walter (David Ayala).
Arnold Wesker's 1957 play, The Kitchen, is given a Manhattan makeover in Alonso Ruizpalacios's La Cocina, as Friday lunchtime at The Grill is disrupted by illegal Mexican chef Pedro (Raúl Briones) discovering that waitress Maria (Rooney Mara) has had an abortion after he has just been accused of theft by boss Rashid (Oded Fehr). If this is a tribute to invisible people, Victor Kossakovsky examines another topic that we take for granted in Architecton, as he and Italian architect Michele De Lucchi consider the history of building materials, through visits to mines and quarries and ruins ancient and modern.
Also eager to Thrill are:- Mehdi Barsaoui's Aïcha; Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel's Eat the Night; Jonathan Millet's Ghost Trail; Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño's Marco; Siew Hua Yeo's Stranger Eyes; and Tinge Krishnan and Nick Murphy's A Thousand Blows.
AND NOT FORGETTING.
Just to dot and cross, the titles included in the 2024 Experimenta section are Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell's Direct Action; Kamal Aljafari's A Fidai Film; Noor Abed's A Night We Held Between; Komtouch Napattaloong's No Exorcism Film; and Daniel Hui's Small Hours of the Night. The Family strand contains Roher and Edmund Stenson's documentary, Blink; Naoko Yamada's anime, The Colours Within; Claude Barras's stop-motion animation, Savages; and Martin Rosen and John Hubley's acclaimed adaptation of Richard Adams's Watership Down (1978), which still doesn't feel like a family film almost half a century after its release.
This poignant animation could easily have found a berth in the Treasures section. Once a highlight of LFF, this hark-back to yesteryear becomes more truncacted with each passing edition, which is a huge shame - as is the fact the titles included are never made available for wider viewing after the festival. For those lucky enough to be within reach of participating venues, the titles are George Stevens's The Talk of the Town (1942); Emilio Fernández's Xochimilco (aka María Candelaria, 1944); Yasuzô Masumura's Manji (aka Swastika or All Mixed Up, 1964); Shyam Benegal's Manthan (aka The Churning, 1976); and Marva Nabili's Khak-e Sar bé Mohr (aka The Sealed Soil, 1977), which is the earliest surviving Iranian film to have been directed by a woman.
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