London Film Festival returns amid the strikes

Having navigated its way through the turbulence inflicted on the film exhibition landscape by the pandemic – the ‘Summer of Barbenheimer’ was greeted, perhaps prematurely, as the end of the post-Covid era – this year’s BFI London Film Festival, along with other major autumn festivals like Venice and Toronto, finds itself facing a new obstacle. The ongoing strike by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) includes a ban on union members attending festivals: presence on the red carpet and participation in interviews is forbidden. With festivals (and the films) reliant on star-studded galas for media coverage, the risk is not just that actors won’t be able to appear in support of their films but, worse, the films may be pulled by nervous distributors, as has happened to Luca Guadagnino’s tennis romance Challengers. Set to open Venice, it was withdrawn and its release delayed to 2024.

Kristy Matheson, previously creative director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, has taken over from the outgoing Tricia Tuttle as the BFI’s festivals director. She is optimistic, despite the strike’s potential effect on her first LFF in charge. She hopes the impact will be mitigated by an international focus: “We’re still looking forward to welcoming ­talents from across the world this year… in many respects we are just presenting the festival as we normally would.” She acknowledges, however, that there will be cases where actors can’t attend, and outlines the festival’s supportive stance. “We respect that there will be certain talents that won’t be able to join us in person – we certainly support people’s right to take industrial action and, like everyone else, we are hoping for a swift resolution. We feel for everyone impacted by the strike. It ­obviously reaches much further than just our festival.”

International though LFF may be, British cinema is strongly represented throughout this year’s programme, with both the opening night film Saltburn and the closing night’s The Kitchen (another world premiere) being large-scale independent productions made by British filmmakers with distinctly British settings. In the former, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman (2020), the director uses her knowledge of high society and elite institutions to craft a satire of the aristocracy, as seen through the eyes of an outsider (Barry Keoghan). The Kitchen looks at the other end of the socioeconomic scale; set in a London of the not-too-distant future, it’s a science-fiction drama co-directed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya (Kaluuya co-wrote with Joe Murtagh), in which residents of the eponymous social housing estate fight back against rampant gentrification and the elimination of social housing.

Whereas other major film festivals – Berlin, Toronto, San Sebastián – nestle their national cinema in its own distinct section, LFF has always spread British films across its programme. Matheson argues that it “gives a sense of the sheer complexity and diversity of British cinema. What’s really thrilling is to see the huge scope in terms of the storytelling and storytellers that are coming out of this region. Even if people just saw a through-line in the programme and only watched films from [the UK], I think they’d get a hugely rich and diverse selection.” Of these, Matheson is keen to spotlight Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, dryly remarking that “it’s breaking news he’s really one of the great British directors”. She praises the romantic drama, adapted from Yamada Taichi’s 1987 novel Strangers and starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, as a “very contained film, a very internal film but [an] incredibly cinematic [one]”, before throwing down a gauntlet to prospective viewers, saying “if you’re not a fan of those actors going in, I’ll challenge the person who isn’t a real fan of them coming out”.

Joining these British highlights are a number of other autumn festival premieres. From Venice comes David Fincher’s hotly anticipated The Killer, an action thriller about a troubled assassin, played by Michael Fassbender; Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s portrait of Priscilla and Elvis Presley’s tempestuous relationship; and Maestro, with Bradley Cooper writing, directing and starring as the charismatic conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. From Toronto comes Miayazki Hayao’s long-anticipated 1940s-set fantasy The Boy and the Heron. And joining the line-up from Cannes are Jonathan Glazer’s imposing German-language Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest, adapted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel; Aki Kaurismäki’s wonderfully dry comedy Fallen Leaves; and Víctor Erice’s masterful, poignant evocation of the power of memory and filmmaking Close Your Eyes, the Erice screening specially presented by Sight and Sound.

With 171 features programmed, there are only so many that Matheson can single out for praise, but she is quick to mention Fingernails (“very intelligent, quite funny, also quite strange”) – a high-concept sci-fi by Greek director Christos Nikou (Apples, 2020), working in English for the first time – before rushing into a flurry of other namedrops from a lively looking Competition slate.

“It’s a really interesting mix of filmmakers: we have very established people like Deepa Mehta [I Am Sirat, a collaboration with Sirat Taneja]… it’s really great to have a Lukas Moodysson film [Together 99, a sequel to 2000’s Together] and Kitty Green’s new film [The Royal Hotel, her follow-up to 2019’s The Assistant] is terrific. We’ve also got the beautiful Starve Acre [by Daniel Kokotajlo, his second feature after 2017’s Apostasy], which is a great British folk-horror.”

In terms of films, then, things are looking as strong as ever. But how does Matheson assess the health of the whole festival ecosystem, having come from EIFF, a festival still struggling for solid ground following its parent charity’s collapse last year?

“I think that, creatively, [the ecosystem] is in a really great space. There are lots of incredibly talented people who are running festivals, people are putting beautiful programmes on and really thinking deeply about audiences, about what their community needs. On that level, there’s a lot to be excited about.” The challenges are on the financial side, a situation not helped by the strikes, but Matheson is still confident. “I don’t think anyone is in a space where they’re feeling budgetarily relaxed, [but] festival workers are always pretty great problem-solvers. Looking at the team I work with, they’re really smart people, creative, lateral thinkers.”

With the wealth of offerings at her disposal, you can’t blame LFF’s director for feeling upbeat – and recent Sag-Aftra waivers for some independent films at Toronto suggest that some stars may come out after all.