Full programme announced for 68th BFI London Film Festival

The 68th BFI London Film Festival (LFF) in partnership with American Express today announces the full programme line-up, which will be presented in cinemas and online, across the UK. Over 12 days from 9 to 20 October, the LFF will invite audiences to return to its fantastic flagship venues in the heart of London – BFI Southbank and the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, which between them host Galas, Special Presentations and Official Competition titles. 

Films and series from all strands of the festival will screen in many of central London’s iconic cinemas with global film talent from behind and in front of the camera in attendance. A curated selection of features will also be showcased at 9 partner venues across the UK.

The LFF will present a vibrant and diverse programme of 255 features, shorts, series and immersive works from 80 countries, featuring 64 languages playing across the 12 days of the festival. This includes 112 works made by female and non-binary filmmakers – 44% of the programme.

Almost every feature and series will screen to audiences in the UK for the very first time, with many shown publicly for the first time anywhere in the world. As in previous years, the feature film programme is organised by strand to encourage discovery and to open up the festival to new audiences. These are: Love, Debate, Laugh, Dare, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Create, Experimenta, Family, Shorts and Treasures. Audiences can also find new and exciting series programming in many of the strands. 

Premieres include 40 world premieres (16 features, 2 series, 19 shorts, 3 immersive), 12 international premieres (6 features, 4 shorts, 2 immersive) and 21 European premieres (17 features, 1 series, 3 shorts).

World premieres from filmmakers and artists include: 

• Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which opens the festival

• Ben Taylor’s Cunard Gala, Joy, starring Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton and Bill Nighy

• The BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation’s restoration Silent Sherlock

• Darren Thornton’s Irish comedy film Four Mothers

• The Extraordinary Miss Flower, a spellbinding performance film from Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

• Thriller series A Thousand Blows from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight

• Endurance, the latest documentary from Oscar-winning directing duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin

• Garanti 100% Kreol, the experimental Créole Réunionnais documentary from Laurent Pantaléon

• Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson’s transformative female prison documentary Holloway

• Magical Bulgarian drama Tarika from Milko Lazarov

• Laila Abbas’ gripping tale of two sisters Thank You for Banking with Us

• That Christmas, our Family Gala, directed by Simon Otto and starring Brian Cox, Jodie Whittaker and Bill Nighy

• Eloise King’s eye-opening investigative documentary The Shadow Scholars

• Adam Wong Sau-Ping’s touching Hong Kong drama The Way We Talk

• Treading Water, the Manchester-set debut feature from Gino Evans

• Martin Rosen’s Watership Down, the BFI’s restoration of one of the UK’s greatest animated films

International premieres include: 

• The Mayor of London’s Gala We Live in Time by John Crowley starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield

• BFI Flare Special Presentation Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy starring Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff

• Sadie Frost’s inspirational biographical documentary Twiggy on the 1960s icon

• Kimberly Reed’s investigative documentary I’m Your Venus following the murder of the Paris Is Burning star

• Jane Mingay’s biographical documentary following impactful musician and artist Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story

European premieres include:

• The American Express Gala of R.J. Cutler and David Furnish’s Elton John: Never Too Late

• William Bridges’ All of You, starring and co-written by Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots

• Natalie Bailey’s off-beat Australian comedy Audrey

• Blink, the remarkable documentary from Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher following a family dealing with blindness

• Bring Them Down, the debut from Christopher Andrews starring Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott and Colm Meaney

• Writer-director Mipo O’s anticipated sixth feature Living in Two Worlds

• Jazmin Jones’ unconventional investigative documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon

• The Thiele brothers’ absurdist comedy Sofa, So Good

• Mysterious thriller The Listeners starring Rebecca Hall from series creator Jordan Tannahill

• The Piano Lesson, Malcom Washington’s directorial debut adapted from August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork starring Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington

• Pedro Martín-Calero’s Nigerian-set thriller The Weekend

“Cinematic ideas materialise in many forms, and this year artists have taken us to some giddy highs and poked at our tender underbellies,” said Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival Director. “Troubled histories linger close to the surface alongside optimistic futures, all explored in unique and creative ways. As the seasons change and we head into the autumn, we invite everyone to come to the BFI London Film Festival to discover and enjoy the whole spectrum of moving image.”

“The real joy of LFF for me is seeing the hard work of so many talented filmmakers come to life and given the prominence and noise that they deserve,” said Ben Roberts, Chief Executive, BFI. “I want to thank our brilliant festival team and everyone involved in bringing these films to our LFF audiences, with extra special thanks to American Express and our other partners and supporters.”

Audiences will enjoy a rich programme of fiction, documentary, animation, artists’ moving image, short film, newly restored classics from the world’s archives, and exciting international works made in immersive and episodic forms. LFF for Free will return to the festival with a compelling range of talks and short films alongside imaginative, playful events and filmmaker Q&As, in-person at BFI Southbank and at gallery@oxo. The festival will also be accessible UK-wide via free short films on BFI Player, including the films nominated for Best Short, which viewers will be able to enjoy from 9 to 20  October.

The LFF is delighted to invite audiences once again to its London hubs on the South Bank and in the West End, with both areas remaining at the heart of the BFI London Film Festival experience. Galas will screen at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on an 18-metre screen with full high-spec 7.1 channel surround sound, aiming to provide the best viewing experience possible for everyone in the over-2000-seater venue. 

Titles from the main programme will screen at a range of cinemas across the city from the BFI’s own South Bank cinemas – BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX – to fantastic partner venues Vue West End, the Prince Charles Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Curzon Soho and Curzon Mayfair, each of them bringing audiences up close and personal with filmmaking talents from the UK and across the globe. 

Festival venues across the UK include Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, Chapter in Cardiff, Glasgow Film Theatre, HOME in Manchester, MAC in Birmingham, Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast, Showroom Cinema in Sheffield, Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle and Watershed in Bristol.

The LFF’s Competition sections celebrate a range of cinematic talents premiering at this year’s festival and feature an incredible range of filmmakers from across the world. 11 films will screen in Official Competition, competing for the Best Film Award, which showcases inspiring, inventive and distinctive international filmmaking, while 11 films will also screen in the First Feature Competition, competing for the Sutherland Award, which recognises the most original and imaginative directorial debut. 

The Grierson Award will acknowledge feature-length documentaries with integrity, originality and social or cultural significance; 8 films will screen in the Documentary Competition. The Short Film Award will recognise short-form works with a unique cinematic voice, with 10 films selected in this category. 

The winners of these four competitive awards will be chosen by LFF Awards Juries, the members of which will be announced in the coming weeks and the winning films will be announced of the final day of the festival – 20 October – with surprise screenings of the winner of the Best Film Award taking place that night. The ever-popular Audience Award will also return for 2024, with audiences being able to vote for their favourite work they saw at this year’s festival, be it feature, documentary or short.

As previously announced, LFF Expanded, the festival’s programme of immersive art and extended reality works, will run from 11 to 27 October 2024. The BFI London Film Festival celebrates the moving image in all its forms, from shorts and features to television, immersive and, for the very first time, video games. LFF Expanded invites audiences to explore and experience powerful new ways of telling stories on screen. Featuring leading British and international filmmakers, artists, and creative teams, including Liam Young, Adrien M and Claire B, Anagram, Darkfield, Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter, and Hatsumi and Monobanda, this year’s programme offers audiences a range of approaches to storytelling at the cutting edge of screen technology. 

LFF Expanded returns with major installations at Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, in the heart of the cultural hub of the South Bank, and exciting works from the programme are also presented at BFI Southbank, BFI IMAX and Outernet London. LFF Expanded will also present an exciting programme of free activity taking place at Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf. For the very first time at the BFI London Film Festival, video games will be showcased via an interactive Games Lounge, featuring five fun and creative projects for audiences to play for free.

The LFF Expanded programme is complemented by events, including a talk from musician and creative technologist Imogen Heap at Southbank Centre, and an engaging conversation on ADHD and gaming at Science Gallery from the team behind Impulse: Playing with Reality.

The LFF continues to showcase compelling series and episodic programming throughout the strands, with new work from some of the world’s most exciting film and TV creatives including Steven Knight, Jon Brown, Thomas Vinterberg, Sam Mendes, Alfonso Cuarón, Janicza Bravo, Nick Murphy and Tinge Krishnan. 

Work screening will include Thomas Vinterberg’s first foray into TV with Families like Ours, Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón’s novel adaptation Disclaimer starring Cate Blanchett, mystery thriller The Listeners from writer-director Jordan Tannahill and starring Rebecca Hall, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows with Stephen Graham and The Franchise from writer Jon Brown and co-directed by Sam Mendes and Liza Johnson.

The festival aims to be inclusive, accessible and welcoming, and alongside the major LFF For Free programme, there will be a limited number of £10 tickets available to all London screenings and events, as well as £5 tickets for those aged 25 & Under. Young cinema goers and emerging professionals can also enrich their experience with the festival through our Family screenings (with tickets priced at £5 for children and from £10 for adults) and via events for young aspiring professionals presented with BFI Film Academy.

A full programme of events and screenings is available for press and industry delegates across the festival. Within a programme of Spotlight talks and panel discussions, global industry leaders, writers, directors and producers will be talking about urgent subjects that are top of the industry’s agenda, sharing their insights and experience with delegates. Full details will be announced in the coming weeks.

It’s a pleasure to welcome back our principal partner, American Express as we celebrate an incredible fifteen years of growing and evolving the festival together. Their support makes the festival possible, as does the continued support of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and The National Lottery. Their funding is essential to our work, and we could not do it without them. 

We are thrilled to welcome back Cunard as a main sponsor of the festival for another year.

The BFI is especially thankful to be expanding relationships with our Industry Supporters and welcome Apple TV+, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Prime Video, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers Discovery to our family – your support is critical to the continuation of the work of the BFI. 

We welcome back and thank Sea Containers London as an official partner – thank you to our generous official hotel.

We are delighted to welcome back Bloomberg Philanthropies and Reddit who have returned as sponsors of the festival, and thank you to Iron Mountain for supporting our Sherlock restoration as a sponsor.

A huge thank you goes to our fantastic in-kind sponsors: Birra Moretti, Christie, and Dalston’s Soda.

LFF partner venues around the UK include:

BFI Southbank
Curzon Soho (Screen 1, 2 and 3)
Curzon Mayfair (Screen 1)
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
LFF Expanded at Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf 
LFF For Free at gallery@oxo
Vue West End 
Prince Charles Cinema
The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
Alexandra Palace Theatre
Press and industry screenings will take place at Picturehouse Central

HOME, Manchester
Watershed, Bristol
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow
Broadway, Nottingham
Showroom Cinema, Sheffield
Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast
Chapter, Cardiff
Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne
Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham

In addition to UK-wide screenings at the festival venues, audiences will also be able to explore LFF programmes past and present with a special collection of films on BFI Player.

Additional screenings on selected titles may also be added during the festival window at other venues. These are at the discretion of the distributor and will be signposted on the festival website where added.

The 68th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express takes place from Wednesday 9 October to Sunday 20 October 2024.