Ultimately, however, all that really matters are the films themselves, so after browsing through its new categories, here is my guide to pictures worth looking out for in this year's London Film Festival lineup.
LOVE
The standout in this field is undoubtedly Michael Haneke's
Amour, but as that's due for a UK release in November anyway, let's look beyond
it to try and discover some smaller gems. I've enjoyed Stéphane Brizé's
previous films a great deal, so I'm pleased to see him back at the festival
with his Miss Chambon leading man Vincent Lindon for A Few Hours of Spring. The
great Abbas Kiarostami makes an unexpected detour to Japan for his new film
Like Someone in Love, while Gillian Anderson has gone to Switzerland for Ursula
Meier's Sister. The erratic young talent of Xavier Dolan will be on display for
a full 159 minutes in his transgender melodrama Laurence Anyways, and director
Ira Sachs draws heavily on his own past for Keep the Lights On. This category also has a strong international flavour, with The
Great Kilapy from Portugal, Epilogue from Israel, With You, Without You from
Sri Lanka and Memories look at Me from China. There's also a couple of
documentaries among these fictional love stories: Liz Garbus' Love, Marilyn is
a tribute to the iconic star while Love in the Grave looks at romance among the
homeless.
DEBATE
I'm not sure what it is about these films in particular that
inspires debate – surely all good films can do that – but I'm guessing that a
lot of the pictures in this category will focus on provocative, hot-button issues. Thomas
Vinterberg's The Hunt, which is about a man wrongly accused of paedophilia,
certainly fits that description, as does Marco Bellocchio's Dormant Beauty,
which explores a real-life euthanasia case from Italy's recent history. The
other pictures that immediately stand out here come from directors whose work I
admire, Lenny Abrahamson's What Richard Did, Matteo Garrone's Reality
and Pablo Trapero's White Elephant. I'm also keen to check out a couple of the
debut films in this collection, notably the Irish film Pilgrim Hill and the
Iranian film A Respectable Family.
DARE
This collection of films consists of the most challenging
pictures in the festival, but the definition is vague enough to cover both
young provocateur Carlos Reygadas, here with Post Tenebras Lux, and the 90
year-old French legend Alain Resnais, whose new film is intriguingly entitled
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. After seeing a creepy clip at this morning's press
launch, I'm very intrigued by the Japanese film Helter Skelter, starring supermodel
Erika Sawajiri, while I have heard very good things about the Danish thriller A
Hijacking and Joachim Lafosse's Our Children. Given the recent run of remarkable
films coming out of Greece, I'm inevitably keen to catch Ektoras Lygizos' debut
film Boy Eating the Bird's Food, particularly as it is screening along with a
new short from Attenberg director Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Ulrich Seidl brings Paradise: Love to the festival, although it's a shame we won't also get Faith, which premiered recently at Venice.
LAUGH
As any LFF veterans will attest, film festivals tend
to be light on films willing to tickle the funny bone, so the creation of a category
for more light-hearted fare is a very positive move. The risk with an
international line-up of comedy films, of course, is that humour doesn't always
travel, and the programme notes for Hong Sangsoo's In Another Country suggest that
his films receive a rapturous reception from Korean audiences that doesn't
resonate elsewhere. There are a few relatively safe bets for UK audiences here –
Ben Wheatley's Sightseers and American indie Celeste and Jesse Forever, for
example – but I'm keen to hear some gags from further afield. I'll be checking
out Everybody in Our Family, the new film from Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, Kenji
Uchida's Key of Life, South African Muslim comedy Material and the Spanish
black comedy Happy Birthday, Grandma!
THRILL
From this apparently exciting bunch, I like the look of the
Korean gangster hit Nameless Gangster and I'll also be checking out the other
offerings from that country, Helpless and the low-budget 3D film Fish. A couple
of pictures in this group have already made waves elsewhere; Compliance has
become one of the most talked-about American films of the year since its
Sundance debut, and Caesar Must Die took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film
Festival. There are opportunities for some fine actors to shine in lead roles –
Blood stars Paul Bettany, I, Anna has the pairing of Gabriel Byrne and
Charlotte Rampling, Everybody Has a Plan stars Viggo Mortensen and Joel
Edgerton takes the lead in Wish You Were Here.
CULT
Here's where the categorisations get a little odd. You can't
really label a new film as a 'cult' film and you can't anticipate which films
will develop a cult following over time. Anyway, it's a very eclectic mix,
ranging from modern silent movie Blancanieves to Room 237, a documentary about
The Shining. Of course Takashi Miike has a new film – For Love's Sake, which is
described in the programme as "Romeo & Juliet as a 60s pop
musical" – and Bubba Ho-Tep director Don Coscarelli returns with John Dies
at the End. Juan Carlos Medina's Painless has an intriguing premise, while Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-sung are together
again with their new film Doomsday Book.
JOURNEY
I'm not sure what to make of this category either, as
"Journey" is a description that could surely apply to most of
the films in the programme. One person who has been on an epic journey over the
past 12 months has been Isabelle Huppert, who appears in four LFF films this
year, including Brillante Mendoza's Captive. This looks like being the category
where I will be going in blind most often and – hopefully – making some great
discoveries. Normally I'm sceptical about portmanteau films, but I'll take a
punt on 10 + 10, which features contributions from twenty Taiwanese directors.
I'm also keen to catch Lines of Wellington, a film completed by Valeria
Sarmiento after the death of her husband Raúl Ruiz, which has been described as
a companion piece to Ruiz's great final film Mysteries of Lisbon. I'll be
seeing The Patience Stone purely on the basis that it stars the brilliant
Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, whose performance in About Elly was one of
the best of recent years, and I'm hoping to see Dreams for Sale as it's the new film from Miwa Nishikawa, whose Dear Doctor was a highlight from LFF 2010.
SONIC + FAMILY
I'm not sure about the wisdom of devoting a whole strand to
music-inspired films when you've only
got six of them. Spike Island has the potential to be the breakout hit from
this collection, but nothing here is really inspiring me. I won't venture
deeply into the Family section either, but I do want to see Ernest and
Celestine, the new animation from the team behind A Town Called Panic. Another French/Belgian production, Le Tableau, looks like it will be one of the most conceptually interesting films in this selection.
TREASURES
As ever, the new films at the London Film Festival are only
part of the story. Every year the archive strand serves up some of the LFF's
most enjoyable and surprising experiences, and this year they have a terrific
line-up. Alfred Hitchcock's last silent film The Manxman will be the Archive
Gala, with a new score by Stephen Horne, while David Lean's classic Lawrence of
Arabia – a must on the big screen – returns to show off the BFI's brand new 4K
projector. Wings is another terrific big screen experience and Roberto
Rossellini's Journey to Italy is screening with an intriguing new addition, a
documentary detailing his relationships with Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman called
The War of the Volcanoes. I'm going to kick-start my long overdue Satyajit Ray
education with his 1963 film Mahanagar and I'm beyond thrilled to see a silent
Lubitsch in the programme, his long-lost 1922 film The Lovers of Pharoah,
starring Emil Jannings. That summary is barely scratching the surface of a
fantastic, diverse and extremely exciting group of films.