by Mary WaireriThe Times BFI London Film Festival is by far and away Britain’s biggest public film event. The Festival is known for providing a platform for a vast range of innovative, exciting films catering to a broad audience. This year, 185 feature films and 133 short films from 43 different countries were premiered at the Festival. The festival also attracted a record number of accredited press delegates from 52 countries as well as the highest ever audience attendance – a mark of its increasing popularity and success. Suffice to say, the Times BFI London Film Festival is a big deal.
The London Film Festival is also a good place to get a sense of the films that we can expect to see over the coming weeks and months. In short; the good, the spectacular, the bad and the incredibly bad are all available here. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises quickly found a place on the more positive side of the fence and has already attracted rave reviews from such unforgiving critics as Mark Kermode. Written by Steve Knight (who also wrote the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things), Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts and explores the dark sub-cultures of London within the context of thriving immigrant communities; organised crime, people-trafficking and other similarly jolly themes. Interview starring Steve Buschemi and Sienna Miller has also garnered positive responses. The film explores the relationship between a world-weary ‘serious’ journalist and the soap-star he’s forced to interview.
From the mainstream to the downright weird, quality documentaries from around the world also emerged at this year’s festival. One of the most interesting was In the Shadow of the Moon, which is based on the Apollo missions and features commentary from Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and other survivors of the Apollo missions. In the Shadow of the Moon features stunning photography and is all the more interesting because it is largely based on previously unseen or long abandoned footage.
Amidst all the quirky but glittering gems to premiere at the London Film Festival there were of course some lumps of coal. Luckily I was only exposed to one of these; Closing the Ring. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Pete Poselthwaite and Mischa Barton, Closing the Ring is the story of a young woman whose fiance – a pilot in the Air Force – crashes his plane in Northern Ireland during World War II leaving her embittered and unable to love again. The most distinguishing thing about this film is that the wooden performances given by the leads are very well disguised by the plethora of clichés in the script and direction – I found myself looking around to see if anyone else was cringing as much as I was. However, all in all, the Festival seems to have gone off with all the usual glamour, flair and just the right touch of the bizarre.
