Lights, camera, action! The 68th BFI London Film Festival is set to dazzle audiences for twelve days in October. From Steve McQueen’s Blitz to French auteur-provocateur François Ozon’s latest, to animated marvel Flow, the festival promises a cinematic feast spanning genres, generations, original features and literary adaptations in a rich tapestry of storytelling, showcasing celebrated superstars and emerging talents across the world.
Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in Blitz

Opening night

Kicking off with a bang, the Opening Night Gala on Wednesday 9 October features the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s Blitz with an ensemble cast led by Saoirse Ronan, Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham, in an expansive tapestry of British life during the defining days of World War II.

Other notable red-carpet galas

  • Mike Leigh returns with Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste coming to terms with family tensions over a Mother’s Day weekend.
  • Amy Adams howls onto the screen in Marielle Heller‘s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s acclaimed novel Nightbitch. New motherhood meets… lycanthropy?
  • Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong dive into the murky waters of American politics in Ali Abbasi‘s The Apprentice, as they play out the Faustian pact between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn that shifted the psyche of American business and politics.
  • Ben Taylor and Jack Thorne bring us Joy, the story of the British pioneers who doggedly defied the odds to create the world’s first test-tube baby, starring Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton and Bill Nighy.
  • Angelina Jolie hits the high notes in a memerising performance as ailing opera diva Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín and Steven Knight‘s Maria.
  • Pedro Almodóvar teams up with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’ What Are You Going Through, it’s a provocative depiction of the emotional turmoil of assisted suicide and end-of-life care.
  • John Crowley’s polished tearjerker We Live in Time serves up Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in a hotly anticipated romcom that’ll melt hearts faster than ice cream in summer.

A global treasury

Glenn Close and Emily Matthews in The Summer Book

The gala screenings merely scratch the surface of a festival that showcases over 250 new features and shorts from around the world. Here are some further picks that might just steal the show:

  • We’re especially excited at the prospect of the world premiere of The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell’s adaptation of Tove Jansson’s tender portrait of intergenerational care and being in nature, starring Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie and impressive newcomer Emily Matthews.
  • François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming is at once a bittersweet family drama and a twisty thriller, with Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko as leads.
  • Call My Agent! breakout star Laure Calamy extends her range as a dedicated mum to a disabled son who is about to become a father in Anne-Sophie Bailly’s debut feature My Everything.
  • Isabelle Huppert pairs up with Korean director-writer Hong Sangsoo for a third time in A Traveler’s Needs, a comic vignette about exile and the art of communication in present-day Korea.
  • William Bridges’ All of You, co-written by and starring Brett Goldstein with Imogen Poots, offers a hilarious and heartbreaking account of love and dating in the modern age.
  • Isaiah and Yassir Lester’s The Gutter sees Susan Sarandon exercise her comic chops alongside Jackée Harry and Kim Fields in an offbeat drama set in a bowling alley on the brink of closure.
  • Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is a surreal meditation on cultural identity and the artifice of cinema, set in a wackily alternative Winnipeg where Iranian is the dominant culture.
  • Jessica Sarah Rinland’s debut feature documentary Collective Monologue navigates contested spaces where culture and nature meet, as it explores complex interactions between animals and their carers in zoos and rescue centres across Argentina.
  • Asif Kapadia’s 2073 is a genre-bending synthesis of fiction and documentary set in a brutal, totalitarian future world, in which Samantha Morton plays a solo survivor living hand to mouth.

Small-screen drama goes large

Preview episodes of selected TV series also get an airing, notably Thomas Vinterberg’s prophetic environmental drama Families Like Ours, in which the government of Denmark responds to unmanageable sea-level rises by dismantling the nation and evacuating its inhabitants to whichever countries will take them.

Wonders of animation

Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow

If you’re a lover of the fantastical, you can feast your eyes on:

  • How to Train Your Dragon co-director Chris Sanders’ adaptation of The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, about a sentient automaton marooned on an island where she sets out to protect the animal inhabitants and her adoptive home.
  • Claude Barras follows My Life as a Courgette with another stop-motion gem, Savages, which sees a young girl in Borneo befriend an orangutan whose existence is threatened by deforestation. It’s like The Jungle Book meets An Inconvenient Truth.
  • Gints Zilbalodis’ second spellbinding feature Flow sees a disparate group of animals including a cat, a lemur and a capybara band together in the wake of a Great Flood. This dialogue-free wonder is Noah’s Ark for the art house crowd!
  • And for a blast from the past, the BFI has lovingly restored Martin Rosen’s classic British animation Watership Down, based on the novel by Richard Adams, which receives its world premiere ahead of a nationwide (re-)release. It’s our favourite bunny adventure, now with 100% more pixel clarity!

Mark your calendars

With its central base at BFI Southbank and the Royal Festival Hall, festival screenings and events will also run in cinemas and venues across central London plus partner cinemas in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. The festival runs from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 20 October. Priority booking is open for BFI members from 10am on Tuesday 10 September, and for the general public on Tuesday 17 September. Join in and celebrate the magic of cinema!
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