New perspectives are exciting, even more so when they arrive on our screens in the medium of a moving picture. The film festival exists for this very reason, giving space to explore even the oldest of tropes with fresh direction, talent and stories.

This year’s London Film Festival was the first for three burgeoning directors. Little unites the work of Jesse Eisenberg, Malcolm Washington and Christopher Andrews in space, time or subject matter, but each of their films at LFF this year has created a similar, quiet sort of realness that explores just how the weight of the past bears down on the present. These were ordinary stories about everyday people, united in their exploration of generational trauma and how it affects the psyche, provokes the paranormal and sometimes erupts in violence.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a road movie that follows cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) on a tour of Poland, undertaken to honour both their Jewish heritage and their recently deceased grandmother. The pair are polar opposites: Benji navigates the world with a carefreeness that is both charming and jarring, while David possesses a tense stoicness that seems to weigh him down.

But as their trip progresses, Benji falls apart. He tries his best to decline any proper engagement with the facts and figures of the Holocaust, and when he does, it results in chaotic, tearful outbursts. The weight of confronting the loss of his grandmother whilst surrounded by the collective pain of his people leaves Benji teetering on an unpredictable edge that, David explains, previously pushed him to take his own life. A Real Pain portrays just two ways in which grief can influence the psyche. In the face of their trauma, David carries all of the resilience, while Benji seems to carry all of the pain.

Just as David and Benji handle their grief differently, so too do the siblings of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson. In 1911 Pittsburgh, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and Boy Willie (John David Washington) are at odds over the fate of their heirloom piano. For Boy Willie, selling it means he can reclaim the land that their ancestors once worked as slaves, but Berniece refuses to let go. She clings to the piano, captured by the carved face of their enslaved mother that gleams in the piano’s ebony wood.

In The Piano Lesson, the effects of this ancestral grief manifest themselves as a paranormal haunting. The ghost of the family’s slave master wanders the halls of their home, entrapped by Berniece’s double act of clinging to the past, while refusing to look it in the eye. The apparitions arrive as a chaotic force that physically pushes Berniece towards the future. Only when she takes a seat at the piano does the haunting cease. The pain remains, as it always will, but the tension shatters and the anger dissipates in a way that only letting go can bring.

There is no such satisfactory release in Bring Them Down. Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) is the sole tender of his disabled father’s sheep farm in the hills of rural Ireland. They are at odds with the neighbouring Keeley family, tethered by a tragic car accident that killed Michael’s mother and scarred Jack Keeley’s mother Caroline. But when Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals two prize rams from their shared mountaintop, tensions come to a head, and before long there’s bloodshed.

Bring Them Down is laced with a collective trauma that explodes into episodes of brutal, male violence. Jack ponders a life outside the farm that he might never see, and Michael is no more than a sullen soldier serving his father’s whims. Both sons are trapped by the weight of their families’ livelihoods – the farms – and when things go wrong, both turn to violence in panicked desperation.

So much of this film echoes an Ireland of past and present; the clipped sentences between Michael and his dad, often spoken as Gaeilge (in Irish); the Tayto crisps and Barry’s Tea bags piled high on the counter; and the terse code of silence that echoes the ancestral Irish quality of looking the other way. It’s a tragic representation of generational trauma that mirrors the classic consequences of rigid Irish masculinity and male aggression.

Though distinct from one another, these portrayals of grief find root in a universal truth; trauma trickles down the family line, and it persists. There are no easy solutions offered here. These films force the viewer to confront the rawness of the human experience, serving as a reminder that healing is a process with no clean-cut end. Yet, through Benji’s vulnerability, the reconnection of the Charles-Doaker family and the desire to break cycles of violence in Bring Them Down, a subtle invitation to move forward is offered. We must take it, even if it hurts.

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.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the least gay sport is ice hockey and the least gay ‘gay’ movie is Kevin Smith’s loved and hated 1997 indie rom-com Chasing Amy. Take this pivotal scene: in an ice hockey stadium parking lot, a man with a goatee, sporting a plaid-shirt-over-white-tee combo is slut-shaming a woman with a pinned-up blow-dry and a leather jacket. Today, this couple seem to have no erotic chemistry or date-appropriate clothing. But this was the 90s – when representations of ‘youth’ were dominated by the super-clean fantasies of Friends and Sex And The City.

During this lovers’ row, cis-het Holden (Ben Affleck) harangues queer Amy (Joey Lauren Adams) over her past threesomes with men and women until she cries out that she was “an experimental girl” until he “sated” her. This is one of many lines marking Chasing Amy as written by a cis-het man with a saviour-dick complex. Watching it, you wonder what Smith (who also made the 1994 cult film Clerks), a trailblazer of mumblecore, stoner comedy, could have been thinking. In a new documentary superfan Sav Rodgers – a trans male filmmaker – tries to find out. Or rather, he tries to try. As Sav examines the original movie’s controversial power over his life, Chasing Chasing Amy emerges as a baggy, amiable yet frustrating film, with a sting in its limp tail.

The form of Chasing Chasing Amy – memoir meets fan film meets cultural history – is promisingly novel, but suffers from too much artless truth on the one hand (Sav’s love story with girlfriend Riley) and Kevin Smith’s disingenuous ‘I’m just a bro’ act on the other. The problem lies partly in its premise, for Sav was saved by watching Chasing Amy, back when he was a suicidal teenage girl, and partly it lies in the decision by Sav, a bright, gentle person – but not a scintillating character per se – to put his own life on film. The talking head interviewees can’t pull apart Chasing Amy without seeming to give Sav a kicking. This is a film that suffers from too much sensitivity and no attack – until it explodes from an unexpected quarter.

Everyone in the film appears gagged by anxiety around LGBTQ representation, except Sav’s hero, Smith. One claim Smith makes is that he wanted to “whip in some gay content for my [gay] brother” – casually betraying his sense of entitlement. The mouthy, chaotic charm of Chasing Amy places it alongside Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and the lesbian Go Fish – films famed for voicing alternatives to dominant white and straight culture. But scenes like the one where Holden and Amy compare dick versus tongue penetration, and Amy demonstrates a bizarre, spread-fingered form of fisting, are written from a profoundly hetero imagination. Sav, however, is far too awed to query Smith’s prurient ham-fisting of the queer experience. Nor does he offer nuanced, detailed insight into why Amy’s fluid sexuality offered him a framework for his identity.

The only eloquent and critical voice, here, is Go Fish writer Guinevere Turner, whose “emotional romance” with Kevin Smith’s creative partner, Scott Mosier, inspired Chasing Amy. Turner is a gem and a highlight is listening to her talk about the beginnings of lesbian indie movie-making, but Turner’s closeness to Mosier and Smith appears to have dampened her “decades of dyke rage” against the film. However, all is not lost, for, finally, in true indie spirit, the very hesitancy of Sav’s interview technique allows an ugly truth to emerge.

Subtext has a funny way of insinuating itself into a gap. Much of the film’s unintentional entertainment comes from watching Smith’s friends stepping around the turd of Smith’s icky immaturities. But it’s with the arrival of ‘Amy’ – Joey Lauren Adams – that we slide beneath Smith’s baseball cap-wearing, puppy-eyed mea culpa schtick.

Once Adams is seated beside Smith, tilted away from him, her mistrustful body language tells a different story to the one she once spouted for the original movie’s publicity about him loving women. Without spoiling anything, it’s sufficient to say that ‘Amy’ herself exposes the sickness of the straight white male ‘chase’. Hers is the flaming torch that any non-cis-het person might be expected to take up. Instead, Sav switches focus to Harvey Weinstein, who selected Chasing Amy as a Miramax film. Weinstein becomes a convenient monstrous shadow, dwarfing revelations about Smith’s behaviour. He is the bête noir that allows Rodgers’ film to end in a vaguely victim-y, vaguely hopeful space.

By making this film about his identity, Sav Rodgers is obliged to dish the truth. There’s no one definitive queer person or queer movie, but an LGBTQ perspective can include humour, irony, empathy and rage against hypocrisy, heteronormative or otherwise. It’s hard to take down your heroes, but it’s disappointing that Rodgers never once raises his fist.

2023 has gifted us with two great films about the slippery morality behind a form of violent political activism that skirts the bounds of terrorism. The first was Daniel Goldharber’s eco-activist procedural, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the second is Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s Baltimore, a careful and idea-rich portrait of society heiress-turned-IRA-operative, Rose Dugdale.

A fascinating but marginal figure in the story of The Troubles, Dugdale planted her red flag in the annals of history by pulling off the biggest art heist of all time, organised with a view to syphoning the funds made from reselling a stash of paintings to help repatriate a gang of incarcerated IRA members.

Lawlor and Molloy have an abiding interest in disguises, alter-egos and the idea of people transmuting into different versions of themselves. Baltimore offers rich terrain on which these concepts can thrive, not least in the idea that Dugdale was born a British blue blood who, through a series of revelations and the fast-tracking of a radical political consciousness, decoupled from a life of obscene wealth and ritual and became an outspoken warrior for class and gender-based injustices.

As essayed by the great Imogen Poots, Dugdale is presented as a person of almost cut-glass seriousness, where every taciturn aspect of her being is dedicated to serving the political cause at hand. The only respite we get from this coldly-obsessive nature is a series of monologues she delivers to her unborn child, all of which are heartbreakingly coloured by the fact that she may very well be dead or in prison by the times this little person makes it out into the world.

The film opens on the heist itself, with Dugdale and a group of male accomplices descending upon the grand Georgian stack of Russborough House in County Wicklow to terrorise its residents and nab a few pieces by some old masters. Rose’s MO is to use threat rather than violence, though the reception they receive by the entitled, dyed-in-the-wool aristos who live in the building ensures that a little bit of blood is spilled. Later, we move to the dinky getaway cottage where Rose et al hole up to make their negotiations, and it’s there where the recriminations and paranoia begin to fester.

The weight of Dugdale’s moral quandary is emphasised through a soundtrack consisting of eerie orchestral stabs – in fact, there’s no-one in the world who’s using the timpani in a more expressive and chilling fashion than Lawlor and Molloy. The story is captured, too, with a glassy precision which negates any element of sensationalism. The whole episode is presented as somewhat bleak and stifling, and it’s only until very late in the film that we see some physical suggestions that the net is closing in on Rose.

Where the kids in How to Blow Up a Pipeline planned a scheme that was unrealistically (though entertainingly) precise, here, you’re given a sense that Dugdale and her crew are largely winging it through an imprecise scheme with no predictable endgame. Yet as much as Baltimore is a film about the process of such an action, it is also interested in showing how class can be a real mind-fuck when it comes to questions of character and comportment.

It’s a chilling and expertly constructed work which goes on to suggest that our finicky anxieties will end up causing our own tragic downfall. Poots brings fire to her role without just splaying it all on the screen, and she ensures that there’s a hair-trigger intensity to every one of her two-hander conversations throughout the film. It’s also a film about the messiness of life and the inherent unpredictability of people, where the idea of crisp, clean action devoid of emotional connection is simply impossible to achieve.

Raven Jackson wants you to feel everything. Her feature debut All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt begins with a close-up of a child’s hand touching the scales of a fish, the first in a symphony of vividly evocative sensory stimuli prefaced by the title: the muck of riverbed sediment, the white noise of rainfall on a body of water, the papery luster of skin under a stark light bulb. Her film traffics in memory, which the human brain retains not as linear completeness but indelible snatches of experience, recollected and recreated here as if taking inventory of a woman’s life.

Specificity is key to Jackson’s tripartite portrait of the stolid, sensitive Mack, a Mississippi native followed from childhood (played by Kaylee Nicole) to adolescence (Charleen McClure) and into adulthood (Zainab Jah). The filmmaker drew on her own upbringing in the American South — around Tennessee, where she shot part of the film — as she formed a whispered cinematic language out of earthy textures, and yet these samplings from a past precise in its style nonetheless amount to an end product both generic and familiar.

Jackson chose her title wisely, the phrase referring to the most distinct moment in a sometimes broad collage of sensations; the young Mack goes with her mother to partake in the time-honored African tradition of eating clay directly from the earth, not just for the nutrients it contains but for the act of communion with the planet and the generations of ancestors cyclically interred in it. With this symbolically freighted gesture, Jackson synthesizes her floating themes of race, womanhood, individual identity, and the give and take between handed-down constancy and personal flux in all three.

In other moments, the ravishingly tactile 35mm photography from Jomo Fray betrays a thinness within the film’s richness, as tableaux seemingly plucked right out of time nonetheless blend together along well-worn narrative tracks. It’s a good thing Barry Jenkins produced this movie, otherwise he’d have an open-and-shut case of creative larceny against Jackson, who ransacks Moonlight’s playbook in search of the secret to its beatific grace. She nicks the pastoral grit of this little-visited corner of Americana, and its connection to water as a locus of spiritual nurturing; stoking maximum catharsis through elliptical structuring that separates and reunites its protagonist from a friend and a lover, this time two different people; the halting, sparse dialogue, so vague in this instance that its near-cosmic expansiveness comes to feel a bit like hand-waving.

Jackson’s elegance as a constructor of images can only do so much to redeem her bluntness as a writer, which saddles the geophagia passage with baldfaced explanation when Mack’s mother spells out, “This you.” Though markers of the period have been scattered throughout, most frequently and least intrusively through costuming, the choice to drop in pointed portraits of JFK and MLK strikes a discordant note as it inserts overt politics into a symphony of suggestions.

It’s a feature debut all right, but generally in the good ways, bursting with pent-up inspiration even if it can’t quite fill the room for growth. But the notion of being as-yet unformed is one with which Jackson and her film are comfortable, having serenely accepted the unending continuity of the soul’s development. Living is learning, a longitudinal accumulation of perspective that deepens rather than changes who we are. Mack explores herself along with her surroundings, organically accruing confidence as she moves through the years; we have every reason to assume that the promising Jackson will do the same through a career with a grasping, altogether auspicious start.

The tired Tarantino ur-myth of the working class, self-starting hipster cinephile has suffused modern film culture to the point where the director is now seen as the equivalent of a boxcar fighter who rose up and went on to nab the title.

The story goes that QT shunned film school and learned all his moves from bingeing through the VHS holdings of the video rental store for which he was the clerk. Well QT ain’t got nothing on Ehsan Khoshbakht, whose own cinephile rite of passage was laced with danger, intrigue, insect infestation, post-revolutionary malaise and a mysterious old movie collector named Ahmad Jurghanian.

Ahmed’s story is inextricably entwined with the politically tumultuous story of modern Iran, where, in the pre-revolutionary era a thriving albeit restricted film culture allowed for screenings of western movies with segments sliced out to retain the moral fortitude of the nation. When a film had completed its run, it was expected that the reel of celluloid would be sent to a film executioner who would bludgeon it with an axe.

Like a wily resistance fighter, Ahmed saved hundreds of films from the chop, alongside stacks of gorgeous original posters, lobby cards and other memorabilia. And then, when the revolution hit and didn’t lead to the liberal utopia that some had expected, he hoarded them in various mouldering basement apartments across central Tehran.

Now, Ahmed was no archivist in the traditional sense, and even though he had an armchair interest in film history, Khoshbakht suggests that he saw these films as more of a personal treasure for which he had to deduce a purpose. Following a few visits, Khoshbakht quickly became Jurghanian’s unofficial mentor and helpmeet.

There was, of course, an inherently political dimension behind his choice to save these films from destruction in a country where owning physical media was against the law. And yet, Jurghanian was not actively engaging in civil disobedience or biting a thumb towards the regime: he merely felt empowered by being the owner of these rusted, unmarked tins full of celluloid dreams. Perhaps they stood in for the family he never had?

Khoshbakht formulates this story as a personal reflection of an era for which his feelings remain ambiguous. The joys of having these films at your fingertips is dashed by the reality that that the entrance to the cave of wonders has been well and truly blocked.

Celluloid Underground is realised through a mix of evocative filmed archive footage (featuring baby Ehsan in his firebrand university days) and a carefully-stitched patchwork of film excerpts, pulled primarily from the little-seen work by pre-revolutionary Iranian filmmakers. The moody texture of the film is enhanced further by Ekkehard Wölk’s gorgeous jazz score.

The film does leave some questions unanswered, and these range from the purely practical (such as what happened to Ahmad’s holdings after he died) to the emotional (such as, what was the reason for emotional chilliness between the men). Khoshbakht’s narration is lyrical to a tee, through he rarely talks about people with the same deeply-felt poeticism as he does the contents of those hallowed film cans. But that, I guess, is the point of the film.

The BFI London Film Festival will be rolling into town on 4 October, and this 67th edition has the potential to be one of the most exciting yet. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a thriller about privilege, status and desire starring her trusty Promising Young Woman collaborator Carey Mulligan, as well as Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant, has been given the shiny opening gala spot.

Closing the festivities will be Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares’ dystopian London-set directorial debut, The Kitchen. Fans of Chicken Run are in for a poultry-packed treat, as Sam Fell and Aardman studio’s belated sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will receive its world premiere on 14 October at one of the festival’s main venues, the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.

As is customary for LFF, the programme is brimming with arthouse sensations, genre gems, crowd-pleasers, immersive VR works and restored treasures from the BFI archive. This edition, the first delivered by new festival director Kristy Matheson, is also stacked auteur heavyweights. Among the headline galas are Yorgos Lanthimos’ much-anticipated Poor Things – destined to be one of the year’s most talked about films – and Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein bio, Maestro, both hot off their September premieres in Venice.

Also in the mix are Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon, Todd Haynes’ scabrous May December, David Fincher’s thriller The Killer, Alexander Payne’s retro comedy The Holdovers, Andrew Haigh’s queer ghost story, All of Us Strangers, James Hawes’ historical biopic, One Life and Jeymes Samuel’s messiah complex satire, The Book of Clarence.

We’re also looking forward to special presentations of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Richard Linklater’s Hitman and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, while other exciting titles include Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Angela Schanelec’s Music and Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex.

All this is only the tip of an iceberg made up of hundreds of titles that fall into a neat set of strands – Love, Debate, Laugh, Dare, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Create, Experimenta, Family, Treasures and Shorts – beckoning audiences to soak up the best offerings from this year’s festival circuit

The 67th BFI London Film Festival runs from 4-15. For more info and to check out the full programme visit bfi.org.uk/lff

Parents can be the cause of our worst memories or the purveyors of our identities – in some cases, they are one and the same. This is pretty much the consensus for on-screen parents too — often they are barely characters in their own right, only serving as either a hindrance or a helping hand in the protagonists’ journey. It is easy to forget that the people who raise us aren’t there to just contribute to our character development or further our own story arcs.

After the height of the pandemic forced many parents and children into closer proximity than ever before, a newfound emphasis has been put on the matter of these relationships, and what they might look like in the modern world. Inverse to that, how parents negotiate the relationship with their children, and how it affects their identities. They are people first — ones who have their own desires and failures that we often fail to put into perspective, preoccupied with our own narrative.

This year’s London Film Festival screened several films that focused on the relationship between parents and children – specifically, portraying parents as people and demystifying the role of a parent, putting them at the front of their own narratives and exposing layers to them that they were not allowed before on film. Three films in particular come to mind that highlight this matter in starkly different but effective ways: Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, and James Morosini’s I Love My Dad.

Aftersun follows Sophie (played at 11-years-old by Frankie Corio) as she reminisces about a holiday to Turkey she took as a child with her young father Calum (Paul Mescal). A trip where they are mistaken as siblings and rife with as much conflict as there is genuine love, it is a personal exploration for Sophie as she tries to reconcile and understand the man her father was. The film is driven by the wonderful performances given by the two leads, but Mescal’s quiet pain as a struggling father who only wants the best for his growing daughter truly pushes it an extra mile, making for a truly engrossing watch.

He juggles his “dad” persona poorly in front of his daughter, and it is easy to catch the cracks of Calum’s struggles the longer the vacation goes on. On top of that, the use of a digital camcorder to frame the trip is a throwback that possibly hits far too close to home for people who grew up in the early 2000s, which makes the viewing experience especially relevant to those who are currently trying to have families of their own, and possibly painful as they reflect on their own parents.

The Whale takes a much more direct approach, focusing specifically on Charlie (Brendan Fraser) as he struggles with his morbid obesity while trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink). Devastating to almost an excessive amount, the film takes a painful look into what caused Charlie’s demise in health and his estrangement from his daughter.

Fraser takes the lead in this film after an unfairly long hiatus from the industry and proves his acting chops — Charlie may have failed in his traditional father role, but his personhood does not stop there as he tries to chase happiness outside of societal expectations. It truly brings up the question of how much must a person sacrifice for the happiness of their children, and if it is worth the eventual gain in the future. Wrapped around by allusions to religion and the classic literature book Moby Dick, it is a powerful watch that speaks to the emotional harm parents can both experience and inflict.

By far the lightest entry of the three films, I Love My Dad is a cringe comedy done right. Chuck (Patton Oswalt) catfishes his son Franklin (Morosini), posing as a waitress named Becca after he is blocked on all social media and effectively ignored on call as well. Having had a bumpy relationship since his son was younger, Chuck’s misguided act to reconnect with him is painful to watch but there is still a sad understanding in his actions. His desperation is fueled not only by the want to keep his father-son relationship, but also by the fact that he is fundamentally not a good person. It is an awful truth that drives the plot forward, even as people around him want him to stop this rather diabolical plan. His personhood is what makes him a bad parent, which then causes for some funny conclusions and a natural separation from his role as a supposed father.

The movies highlighted are not the limit to this burgeoning genre of films, and there are other explorations of parenthood to be found outside the role of a cisgender white father. Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny is a deeply personal but broadly understood film that portrays its main character as a woman as much as she is a mother. Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter and Florian Zeller’s The Son echo this pattern, while outside the LFF programme, breakout hit Everything Everywhere All At Once by The Daniels focuses on mother-of-one Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh) and her questions regarding her life path.

With the number of films on this topic that have popped up during the festival and outside of it, the influx in separating parents from their parenthood might signal a recent reconsideration of the people that raise us. A person’s individualism does not disappear the moment they become a parent, and that is more than okay – seeing more films explore the interiority of the people who shape our understanding of the world is as great as it is poignant.

A comedic one-shot murder mystery surrounding a group of hairdressers at a regional hairdressing competition, Medusa Deluxe is the debut feature by writer/director Thomas Hardiman. Their work comes to a grinding halt after the discovery that the rumoured frontrunner has been scalped and killed – from here the film unfolds into a story of detective work, rivalry, and artistic obsession.

Although foremost a murder mystery, Medusa Deluxe is also the story of the obsessed artist, in a less traditional sense than seen in other films of its nature. Right from the opening scene Cleve (Clare Perkins) is labouring over her “fontange” and perfecting the style in a bid to prove that even amidst the competition’s cancellation, she is the best hairdresser. Even the hairdressing victim was rumoured to have been in his seventh hour of perfecting his hairstyle when he met his death. The artistic obsession surrounding the competition breeds rivalries between those most competitive which adds to the layers of tension and suspicion. Through this Hardiman highlights the beauty and intricacy behind hairdressing and its artistic value which can be made level to other more traditional art forms.

A standout strength of the film comes from the fiery, predominantly female-led cast. The flamboyant storyline is further enhanced by an array of characters with incandescent personalities, the dynamics between characters supplying comedic relief whilst contributing to the suspicion and intrigue of the murder mystery at large. Consequentially the correct execution of these roles is essential in making sure that the film is theatrical without becoming gauche or corny. Nonetheless, the cast was able to perfectly embody their characters with standout performances from Clare Perkins as the spunky hairdresser Cleve and Luke Pasqualino as Angel, the effervescent lover of the murdered hairdresser.

The strength in the film’s casting comes not only from the acting performances but from its diversity. Though the hairstyles were not always a focal point in the film it was enjoyable to see the diversity in hair types included as well as in the hairdressers themselves through the boundary-pushing hairstyles of stylist Eugene Souleiman. Although not the main point of the film, it was an important detail that will not go unnoticed by those of us who have only over the last decade seen the celebration of our hair and diversity in those working on it in mainstream media.

Medusa Deluxe is visually stunning due to the film’s skillful editing and cinematography. The one-shot aspect is achieved successfully through the seamless editing work of Fouad Gaber, with clear-cut camerawork which allowed for smooth transitions between character perspectives throughout. This editing works well to complement the most impressive part of the film which is easily the way it looks due to the cinematography work of Oscar nominated DoP Robbie Ryan. Ryan’s portfolio is nothing short of impressive with films including The Favourite (2018) and Fish Tank (2009), and Medusa Deluxe is no exception. Ryan is able to take a somewhat plain building, where the entire film takes place, and transform it into something equal parts eerie and beautiful.

Medusa Deluxe is a fun and extravagant murder mystery that shines a light on the beauty of hairdressing whilst leaving audiences guessing in this quick-witted whodunit.

In 2015, during his widely debated TED talk, American entrepreneur and visual artist Chris Milk described Virtual Reality as “the ultimate empathy machine.” Since then it has become an emergent and rapidly evolving medium in non-fiction filmmaking, but can VR really influence the way we think as individuals, and as a society? How can artists use this technology to create change in the world today? Those were the questions at the forefront of the Expanded strand at this year’s London Film Festival.

The BFI’s immersive art and XR strand screens more than just VR, and showcases a rich selection of works from artists at the forefront of emerging technologies. From augmented reality works like Guy Maddin’s Haunted Hotel in which a series of esoteric collages reveal the manifold permutations of desire and Untold Garden’s Apparatus Lundens, an artificial intelligence-driven experience that asks uncomfortable questions about our digital footprint. There were also immersive audio pieces like Darkfield Radio’s Intravene, a sound experience about the opioid overdose crisis in Vancouver. However, the explosion in both the technical capability and the affordability of virtual reality headsets meant that VR still dominated this year’s program.

One of the main appeals of VR is its ability to drop you directly into other worlds, particularly inaccessible ones, something Dutch artist Dani Ploeger does remarkably well in his latest work Line of Control. Perhaps the simplest, yet most effective piece in this year’s Expanded program, Ploeger’s latest work positions the viewer on the frontline of the Russia-Ukraine war. Using an endless loop of soldiers standing around smoking cigarettes and digging trenches, Ploeger gives us an image of war we’re not used to seeing in cinema; the endless waiting.

One criticism levelled at the use of VR for non-fiction storytelling is that by using a technology used for gaming you run the risk of trivialising the suffering of others. Ploeger is well aware of these concerns, and juxtaposes the stillness of this 360 degree landscape with a terrifying soundscape triggered by the viewers’ eye movement. Whenever you close your eyes, you’re met with the deafening sound of gunfire. Ploeger created this soundscape using archive sounds from films to challenge the spectacle associated with cinematic representations of war and recreate the anxiety of inhabiting a space where violence could erupt at any moment. It might sound odd that in a medium commonly celebrated for its visual capabilities Ploeger would choose to use sound to get his message across, but the act of listening was a common theme in this year’s program.

Joanne Popinska’s The Choice, a VR documentary about reproductive rights in the US, also encourages us to lean in and listen closely, taking the form of a conversation with Kristen, a young First Nations woman living in Texas. Sat on a stool directly opposite the viewer, in an otherwise empty space, she discusses the legal obstacles and dehumanising experience she faced seeking a termination. Abortion is arguably the most divisive issue in US politics right now. However, in a recent YouGov poll, one of the main factors behind people changing their minds about reproductive rights was knowing someone who has had an abortion.

The idea that VR can convince people to change their firmly held beliefs on a topic is not a new one, similar claims have been made of cinema for years. However, instead of using the technology at her disposal to recreate Kristen’s story and immerse the audience in her experience, she uses it to create a more direct relationship with her. At certain moments in Kristen’s interview she stops talking and the audience is forced to choose between two questions to ask her. Their selection dictates the direction the conversation takes, providing a sense of agency that transforms the viewer into an active listener.

Despite all the technological advances in VR, it’s still hard to create the feeling that you’re really there, whether watching a movie or listening to someone like Kristen tell their story. To feel really present in a story you need to blur the line between simulation and reality, but that’s hard to do when you’re wearing a clunky headset. When Popinska first screened The Choice, she kept the real-life Kristen hidden in a nearby room so people could give her a hug after they finished the film. But what if the person you were listening to during an experience was sat directly opposite you the whole time?

That’s exactly what happens in Charlie Shackleton’s autobiographical VR film As Mine Exactly, a one-on-one performance piece in which the director sits across the table from the viewer the whole time. Part desktop documentary, part expanded cinema performance, Shackleton projects images and videos from his youth onto the VR screen while he talks directly to the viewer about his mother’s experience with epilepsy, and how viewing her seizures as a young boy has impacted his relationship with documentary filmmaking.

Shackleton was last at the London Film Festival with his film The Afterlight, a cinematic collage in which he brought together a vast ensemble of over three hundred actors who are no longer alive into one film that exists as a single 35mm print that will eventually deteriorate and become lost forever. Performed to one visitor at a time, As Mine Exactly takes Shackleton’s fascination with temporality one step further, and is entirely contingent on the director being present. No one performance is ever the same, with Shackleton using eye motion sensor technology as well as old-fashioned body language to see which parts of the performance the viewer is engaged with and then building the piece around their reactions.

Participating in this performance makes for an unusual experience. Not because of the technology involved, or the presence of the director in the room, but because it’s rare we actually ever listen to someone this intensely. All of us at some point or another have had a conversation where we felt like the other person wasn’t really listening. Perhaps they were looking at their phone or trying to think of a polite way to interrupt you and shift the conversation to themselves. In As Mine Exactly you’re a captive listener. There are no gaps in the conversation for you to interject with your own anecdotes, or breaks in the performance to go to the toilet or grab a drink. For the full thirty minutes you just sit, look and listen.

Much of the power of As Mine Exactly comes from the connection Shackleton creates with his audience throughout the performance. He talks directly to you in a soft and genial manner, generously sharing with you deeply personal memories about his childhood and his relationship with his mother. Wearing a VR headset can often feel like quite a vulnerable experience, but by sharing his desktop with you, Shackleton creates a space of transparency and invites the viewer to experience a new form of intimacy.

This is perhaps most apparent when Shackleton stops speaking directly to the viewer and begins a live conversation with his mother. He performs his lines live, while his mother’s pre-recorded voice plays from a speaker just behind the viewer. They talk about their memories of these seizures, and how they feel rewatching this footage almost two decades later. The film could be viewed as a study of the way technology materialises memory, or the way we frame and reframe our pasts. However, what eventually emerges from these conversations is a profoundly moving Insight into the reality of living with epilepsy, with As Mine Exactly proving that when it comes to understanding the lives of others, listening is the real key to empathy.