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As the curtain falls on the Venice and Telluride film festivals, and just before Toronto begins, the 69th London film festival has announced a programme that cherrypicks from all three predecessors.
The annual public festival takes place in London but offers virtual and brick-and-mortar opportunities for people to watch from all over the UK.
The third Knives Out film featuring Daniel Craig’s eccentric detective, Benoit Blanc, opens the festival, following its debut in Toronto later this week. Other key screenings include the European premiere of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the Maggie O’Farrell adaptation which won raves for Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal at its Telluride premiere last weekend, and the UK premieres of Hikari’s Rental Family, starring Brendan Fraser and Noah Baumbach’s meta comedy Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney.
Bradley Cooper’s third film as director/star, standup comedy drama Is This Thing On? is also on the lineup, as is Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’s well-received latest collaboration with Emma Stone.
No less than 247 films are on the lineup this year from 79 countries, with 103 of them made by female or non-binary directors. This proportion – 42% – is marginally down on last year (44%), although there is parity in both the official competition selection and the debut film-makers sidebar.
The latter category includes some high profile names, including Kristen Stewart, whose directorial debut The Chronology of Water stars Imogen Poots as an abuse survivor, as well as 27-year-old Ronan Day-Lewis, whose first feature, Anemone, was co-written by his father, Daniel, who also stars.
The three time Oscar winner is the highest profile booking in the festival’s lineup of screen talks, which also includes Lanthimos, Jafar Panahi, Lynne Ramsay and Richard Linklater.
The notoriously retiring star, who quit acting for the second time in 2017 before returning to make Anemone, is likely to be a hot ticket when he takes to the stage at the BFI Southbank to discuss his new film and career to date.
“We really never thought that would happen,” said Kristy Matheson, director of the festival, of the booking. Although sworn to secrecy over Anemone, which has its first screening in New York in early October, Matheson said she believed audiences would be surprised by the film, which is set in the late 1980s and features Day-Lewis and Sean Bean as brothers who served as soldiers in Northern Ireland 20 years before, alongside co-star Samantha Morton.
“It’s a really exciting debut because you’ve got these great actors – a really exceptional cast – but it doesn’t get them to do all the heavy lifting. It’s bold and it takes some really big swings stylistically.”
Matheson notes that this year’s crop of movies also demonstrate an appetite among film-makers to play with the form.
“There are so many films that seem to really be kind of stretching the language of cinema. It’s a medium that allows us to sort of play with time and space and so many directors are doing that.”
She points particularly to the roster of urgent political films on this year’s slate, including Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, about corruption and paranoia in Iran, and fellow Cannes winner The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho, set during the Brazilian military dictatorship – “a classically made film, but with so many playful interventions”.
Also on the programme are The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of the 2024 IDF killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl who lived in the Gaza Strip and Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s Moroccan desert thriller.
But Matheson remains sceptical that film-makers have pulled up their collective socks as an emergency response service amid widespread global unrest.
“Often films that seem topical have been in the making for many years. And sometimes, it’s just that the dial hasn’t really moved.” Matheson cites Landmarks, Lucrecia Martel’s documentary about the murder of Indigenous leader Javier Chocobar and the legacy of colonialism on Latin America.
“That’s a very specific case, but she uses it to really look at the effects of colonisation on her country, and you can expand out further from that and think about the effects of colonisation on many different places. So it feels a really timely concept.”
The Argentine director has, like Day-Lewis, been out of the spotlight for some years: her last feature was 2017’s Zama, which was made nine years after 2008’s The Headless Woman, regularly cited as one of the best films of the century so far.
Her return, alongside that of Zhao, Ramsay and Kelly Reichardt (with The Mastermind), gives Matheson cheer, she says, in the face of otherwise disappointing statistics. “A 42% proportion [of non-male directors on the programme] is certainly not a number about which we would say, oh, isn’t this great. But these are major female directors with incredibly strong films.”
World premieres at the festival include a drama about the friendship between Kate Moss and Lucian Freud and boxing drama Giant, starring Amir El-Masry and Pierce Brosnan.
