Film Gems Galore At BFI London Film Festival #LFF

25th October 2015

Festivals are great except when you are a film critic and there are so many films and just not enough hours in the day. What did you manage to see at the BFI London Film Festival 2015; Suffragette, Steve Jobs, Grandma, Carol, Brooklyn, The Lady In The Van, yes, no? I sound as if I am complaining and in a way I am; days need to be at least 36 hours long so I can manage to watch all the films, write reviews and sleep. Festivals for those who are in the film industry are like a two week zombie existence of coffee, blistered fingers from copious note taking, sore legs – running to screenings and a serious lack of vitamin D – watching on average 3 films a day in a dark room. Yet, I feel strangely bereft when it is all over.

The selection at this year’s LFF was incredible and I had scribbled down a long list of films I wanted to see. Finally, I only managed four at LFF and one interview but they took me across continents and through time. A documentary from Chile: The Pearl Button by Patricio Guzman that marries together the source of life: water with the unimaginable suffering of the Chilean people under various dictators the last of whom was Pinochet. It imbues the viewer’s mind with the essence that was here before man, water, and the suffering man has cast into it, Pinochet’s men throwing their fellow countrymen into the sea to cover up the atrocities of the genocide that blighted Chile when Pinochet deposed Allende. Lighter but no less serious is Taxi Tehran or sometimes known as Taxi by Jafar Panahi, who deftly manages to make a film where the questions raised don’t necessarily require answers and shows us that despite what the sanctions the State threaten him with he will continue to do what he loves. Everyone can relate to humour. Taxi is funny. Can you imagine Steven Spielberg driving a taxi around downtown L.A. and filming and interacting with the passengers – well that’s what Panahi did.

Youth by Paolo Sorrentino – an ensemble of greats: Harvey Keitel, Michael Caine, Rachel Weiss. The film begs the question what is youth – is it a state of mind, a routine and is it wasted on the young. Maybe the latter was Sorrentino’s premise but regardless it a visual feast for the eyes. Sometimes you reminisce and think my childhood and youth were the best time ever and how it’s inextricably linked to who you become in the present. That deals with one aspect of the multilayered film: My Golden Years by Arnaud Desplechin. The perfect end to my London Film Festival 2015 was to interview Arnaud Desplechin in French, without need of the interpreter, to hear what it’s like to revisit a character 19 years later and why he would never had written or even directed My Golden Years had Mathieu Amalric was not interested.

The London Film Festival ran from 7 to 18 October 2015.

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