Bouncing back from two years in pandemic lockdown, the first in-person edition of the BFI London Film Festival since 2019 made a strong selling point of bringing people back together for communal big-screen gatherings, spreading the love with simultaneous screenings of bigger titles across London and the wider UK. With 159 films and 21 world premieres screened over the last two weeks, the program was slightly down on previous years, but audience numbers have been healthy. Behind this confident comeback, however, there were frustrating problems with long queues, ticketing restrictions and an unusually weak online presence for a self-styled “hybrid” event.
With Covid and Brexit making international travel difficult while simultaneously pushing hospitality costs through the roof, the 65th LFF had fewer late-night parties and starry premieres than usual. In addition, the much-postponed James Bond blockbuster resulted in an unforeseen schedule clash between irresistible force and immovable object. With No Time To Die still dominating most big cinema screens in central London, the festival team were forced to improvise around it. For the first time, major gala screenings were relocated to the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank of the river Thames, a monumental concrete culture bunker normally reserved for live music. This landmark state-funded arts complex is actually a grander venue than any of London’s bigger commercial cinemas, and could become a classy future hub for the LFF.
Historically more of a public-facing “festival of festivals” than a major industry launch platform, the LFF typically brings together buzzy breakout films from Cannes, Venice, Toronto and elsewhere. Indeed, London only introduced competition prizes in 2009. But largely thanks to the marketing muscle of streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, HBO and Apple, this year’s program boasted some glitzy world premieres alongside a mixtape of local and regional debuts. Film purists may decry the increasingly blurry line between TV and cinema content, but ticket-buying audiences are less sniffy.
As a celebration of diversity and politically conscious cinema, the 65th LFF scored highly. The heart-tugging debut feature Hit The Road by Panah Panahi, son of banned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, won the festival’s main prize. Five of the other six main awards went to female film-makers, with Belgian director Laura Wandel’s taut school-bullying drama Un Monde (Playground) winning Best First Feature and Lebanon’s Mounia Akl taking home the newly inaugurated Audience Award for her bittersweet family saga Costa Brava, Lebanon. Jane Campion’s gritty gothic western The Power of the Dog, Andrea Arnold’s charmingly offbeat bovine documentary Cow, and Julia Ducournau’s deliciously deranged Cannes prize-winner Titane were all hot-ticket screenings too.
London is a more multicultural city than any of Europe’s other big festival locations, and actors and film-makers of colour were a significant presence across the LFF program. Hip-hop mogul turned movie producer Jay-Z flew in with his superstar wife Beyoncé to attend the world premiere of director Jeymes Samuel’s flashy Netflix-bound western The Harder They Fall, which features a gallery of major black talent including Idris Elba, Regina King and LaKeith Stanfield. Later in the festival, James Bond co-star Lashana Lynch earned rave reviews in black British director debbie tucker green’s timely race-themed ensemble drama ear for eye, while Denzel Washington brought heavyweight world-weary charisma to Joel Coen’s ravishing monochrome Shakespeare adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth.
In terms of British films making their debut on home turf, LFF audiences gave a warm welcome to Joanna Hogg’s beautifully crafted autobiographical drama The Souvenir Part II, Philip Barantini’s gripping single-shot restaurant thriller Boiling Point, and Harry Wootliff’s True Things, a toxic love story co-starring Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke – indeed, the latter won Wootliff the £50,000 IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Bursary award, a new addition to the festival’s prize portfolio. But the most rapturous reception was reserved for Kenneth Branagh’s heartfelt childhood memoir Belfast, which struck a deeper chord in London than in Toronto or Telluride, where many non-Brit critics were defeated by the thick Northern Irish accents and complex political hinterland. Branagh is a divisive figure in Britain, but his most personal and visually stunning film to date already feels like a sure bet for awards season.
Alas, the festival team did not get everything right in their haste to host a post-pandemic comeback, with some film-makers and media commentators expressing alarm at the light-touch approach to Covid precautions. While LFF employees had to test every two days, visitors were not required to show a vaccination passport or negative test proof as in Cannes, Venice and Toronto. “We have been really rigorous around Covid protocols in line with both government guidance and other cultural events,” LFF director Tricia Tuttle insisted over the closing weekend in response to criticism, “at the time of writing we have had no known cases of Covid at the festival.”
For critics and reviewers, the LFF’s most glaring flaw was its cumbersome, heavily oversubscribed system of press and industry screenings. For buzzy titles like Titane or The French Dispatch, hundreds of people waited in line for more than two hours, longer than the films themselves, only to be turned away. Getting up in the dark to try and secure seats at early morning films became a risky endurance test for many, effectively excluding anyone with a busy workload or family commitments. The dread phrase “worse than Cannes” should not be used lightly, but even the famously fractious French festival recently improved its press premieres with a smoother pre-booking system and multiple secondary screenings. London is being left behind.
Exacerbating this issue was the festival’s pitifully small library of titles available for online viewing, a big reduction on previous years. Inexplicably, digital screenings were also restricted to a very narrow time window, adding to the stress of an already packed schedule. Having paid the fairly hefty 50 pounds (60 Euros) press accreditation fee, many questioned whether it was worth the money. Two steps forwards, one step back, the 65th LFF was mostly a very welcome celebration of cinema as communal force and vital, global, politically conscious art form. But these pointlessly self-defeating problems need to be fixed next year.
