When faced with the cinema deluge that is the programme for the London Film Festival, initial excitement can often give way to anxiety and then, possibly, confusion. What should I see? What should I take a gamble on? How can I make sure I’m not making a terrible error of judgement? Well, no one can answer those questions definitively, but we can offer you this handy guide to 20 films playing in the themed, non-gala strands. Some of them we’ve managed to scoop up at previous festivals; others are merely on our own lists of “to see” films that we want to share with you.
A Fidai Film
Experimenta
In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut, raided the Palestinian Research Centre and looted its archive. Kamal Aljafari’s latest “sabotage film” looks excellent – an experimental, poetic weaving together of lost and reclaimed archival footage of life in Palestine before and after the 1948 Nakba, reclaiming and restoring the looted memories of Palestinian history in a cinematic rebellion against a long history of visual dispossession.
Manji
Treasures
The Treasures strand may be a pale shadow of its former self, with just five titles playing at this year’s festival, but you’d do well to catch this restoration of Yasuzô Masumura’s sexploitation melodrama from 1967. It sees two women descend into a world of trouble upon their decision to embark on an illicit affair, and the fallout is presented in gaudy colour on a giant, widescreen canvas.
Collective Monologue
Documentary
Filmed in various zoos and animal sanctuaries in Argentina, the perceptive lens that Jessica Sarah Rinland’s film employs is one that invites us to see the world from an animal’s perspective, exploring a closeness and emotional connection that transcends the boundaries between species.
Small Hours of the Night
Experimenta
Composed of haunting 16mm closeups in a dark, smoke-filled room, Daniel Hui’s piece of docu-fiction draws from key moments of Singaporean history during its darkest periods. The minimalist staging centres the experience of a woman confined within an interrogation room, with what looks like an impressive control of light and shadow.
Julie Keeps Quiet
Debate
While Challengers will likely remembered as the film that proved the dramatic potential of tennis in narrative cinema, Leonardo Van Dijl’s morally precarious psychodrama, Julie Keeps Quiet, follows a young tennis player who must decide if she should speak out against an abusive, controlling coach if it might put her own sporting future into jeopardy. Hangs on an intense lead performance by Ruth Becquart, who also co-wrote the film.
Youth (Homecoming)
Debate
The second epic chapter of Chinese experimental documentarian Wang Bing’s exploration into the low-wage textile industry in his country. Rather than provide an open and partisan political discourse, Wang objectively observes the scads of young workers as they jostle for more money and attempt to rise up the limited professional ladder that their default occupation has allowed them.
Grand Tour
Love
Following his delightful pandemic doodle, The Tsugua Diaries, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes returns with a poetically-inclined historical galavant through south-east Asia in which a groom who jilts his bride at the altar heads off on an adventure, and then his bride decides to follow him. It’s a film about how romantic concepts of colonialism have embedded themselves within a modern mindset, an idea which poses fundamental questions about how we tell stories.
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
Debate
With several decades’ worth of newsreels and media archival footage from Sweden’s primary public broadcasting network, Göran Olsson’s three and a half hour long documentary painstakingly charts the complexities of shifting geopolitical currents and the ways in which media narratives have shaped historical understandings of Palestine’s occupation by a violent, ever-expansionist zionist machine.
Collective Summoning
Experimenta
Three formally audacious short films – Noor Abed’s A Night We Held Between, Komtouch Napattaloong’s No Exorcism Film and Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del – are brought in conversation under the frameworks of ritual, myth and national history to reach towards a sense of “cross-temporal solidarity” across Palestine, Thailand and Iran.
Universal Language
Laugh
We know that some filmmakers will go to the ends of the earth to get their darling movie made. Canadian writer/director Matthew Rankin learned Farsi to bring a lived-in authenticity to his deadpan ode to the Iranian New Wave. It’s a strange tale set in a surreal amalgam of Winnipeg and Tehran, its story is kicked off when a young girl finds a banknote frozen in ice and travels around town to try and retrieve it.
The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire
Experimenta
Suzanne Césaire was a pioneering figure of Afro-Surrealism, an anti-colonialist activist and writer whose achievements are condemned to exist in the shadow of her husband’s enduring political legacy. Rejecting formal conventions, multidisciplinary artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich devotes a heartfelt, metafictional ballad to the life of “an artist who didn’t want to be remembered” in a way that’s been likened to a fever dream.
The Sealed Soil
Treasures
Marva Nabili’s haunting 1977 debut feature, the earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman, has been newly restored in 4K. It explores a young woman’s rebellion against the patriarchal restrictions imposed on her when she reaches the age of marriage in a deft and powerful exploration of female subjugation and resistance.
Chain Reactions
Cult
Swiss filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has his own little cottage industry in elevated docs which look back analytically at the history of cinema. His new one, Chain Reactions, is timed to the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and he brings in a number of talking heads culled from the worlds of filmmaking, journalism and academia.
The Wailing
Cult
A friend who caught filmmaker Pedro Martín-Calero’s debut feature when it played at the San Sebastián Film Festival described it as a Spanish It Follows, and the logline would have it that psychological horror adds its own twist in that the majority of its cast are women. It’s a story about a woman searching for her biological mother, and it’s a quest which comes with a number of unwanted (to say the least) consequences.
Eephus
Journey
This delightful, low-slung ode to the logistics and lore of baseball is one of those movies where you really don’t have to be a fan of the sport to be able to immerse yourselves into the deeper concerns of the characters and wider implications of its themes. It sees a socially-diverse posse of beer-swilling ball-players assembling for the final ever game on a field set for demolition. Bittersweet, and then some.
Abiding Nowhere
Create
Nobody really took Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s 2012 retirement announcement that seriously, and after a brief pause he went on to make a number of (superb) features, shorts and documentaries. Abiding Nowehere is a new entry into his “Walker” saga, in which actor and muse Lee Kang-sheng, dressed in orange monk robes, walks extremely slowly across a number of urban and rural landscapes. In this one, he’s made it across the pond to Washington DC.
I’m Still Here
Special Presentation
With his first narrative film in over a decade, the legendary Brazilian director Walter Salles sensitively depicts the forced disappearance of former congressman Rubens Paiva after being abducted by the military junta. By no means is this a traditional biopic – Salles fixes his gaze on the Paiva matriarch, Eunice, played with striking, nuanced assurance by Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres in a profoundly emotionally layered image of resistance.
The Treasury of Human Inheritance
Experimenta
Empathy and care lie at the core of this programme of three poetic shorts screening alongside Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s abstract film essay centred on the ‘lived body’, with works by Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Sarnt Utamachote Paul Stewart, Sarah Perks and JT Trinidad converging in their poignant explorations of care, cohabitation and community in the face of crisis, grief and adversity.
Harvest
Special Presentation
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s hypnotic English language debut set in a medieval village is a searing indictment of industrialisation over nature – a gorgeous myth about community, capitalism accentuated by Sean Price Williams’ stunning cinematography and Caleb Landry Jones’ impressive lead performance.
The Stimming Pool
Create
A product of The Neurocultures Collective and director Steven Eastwood, The Stimming Pool is a film which aims to empower a set of neurodiverse artists to be able to make their own creative statements. The bold aim of this film is to place the viewer directly into the headspace of an autistic artist, described as a visceral journey through that world as experienced literally and metaphorically, consciously and subconsciously.
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