68th London Film Festival (9/10/24–20/10/24)

The 68th BFI London Film Festival closed on Sunday 20th October with the European Premiere of Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece (pictured above), a vibrant journey through the life of cultural icon Pharrell Williams, all told through the lens of LEGO animation. In addition to Neville and Williams, the event was attended by an exciting array of special guests from the worlds of music, fashion and sport. The Closing Night Gala took place at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, which returned as the festival’s Headline Gala and Special Presentation venue for a fourth time since its inaugural year in 2021.

Placing audiences at the heart of the festival, the winners of this year’s LFF Audience Awards, as chosen by members of the public, were announced yesterday. Darren Thornton’s funny and heartwarming comedy drama Four Mothers, about one Irish son juggling four very different mothers, took the Audience Award for Best Feature; Holloway, which follows six women who were formerly incarcerated at what was once the largest women’s prison in Europe, was the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary; and Two Minutes won the Audience Award for Best Short Film.

The 68th edition welcomed more than 815 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives to present their work at venues across the capital. The festival kicked off with a press conference for the world premiere of Opening Night Film Blitz led by Steve McQueen. The festival’s highly anticipated series of Screen Talks included acclaimed filmmakers Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Mike Leigh, Denis Villeneuve, remarkable acting talents Lupita Nyong’o and Zoe Saldaña (star of Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, pictured below), as well as the versatile Daniel Kaluuya.

The festival featured an exciting range of 252 titles (comprising features, shorts, series and immersive works) hailing from 79 countries, and featured 63 languages. All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 38 World Premieres, 12 International Premieres (6 features, 4 shorts, 2 immersive) and 21 European Premieres (17 features, 1 series, 3 shorts). Across the programme, including events for industry delegates and the immensely popular LFF for Free programme, the festival had 230,342 attendances, the highest in-person attendance in the last ten years.

Source/images: BFI

HBF+Europe: Post-production Support Grants Announced

International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has announced the four projects each awarded a grant of €60,000 through the HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme. The awards, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, offer support for the final stages of European co-productions with filmmakers from regions where the Hubert Bals Fund targets its support. Filmmakers from Georgia, Nepal, Peru and South Africa are supported through co-producers in Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands respectively. The diverse projects range from a 16mm inquiry into coloniality to a revenge noir.

Georgian filmmaker Rati Oneli’s feature fiction debut Wild Dogs Don’t Bite follows his observational documentary on a derelict mining town City of the Sun, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2017. Dealing in the winners and losers of post-Soviet Georgia, the film is a noir-inspired revenge thriller. Nepalese filmmaker Sahara Sharma’s film My Share of the Sky is a search for the elusive dream of home in a patriarchal society, as a young woman grapples with uncertainty on the eve of her wedding. Sharma was the first female director to open the Kathmandu IMFF with her debut Chasing Rainbows.

The selection moves into the realm of experimental storytelling with Estados generales by Peruvian filmmaker Mauricio Freyre, whose current project is a 16mm film that reimagines the voyage of a parcel of seeds from Madrid back to the place where they were picked in Peru. Fresh from the premiere of their Afrikaans-language drama Carissa in Venice earlier this year, Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are supported for Variations on a Theme. Like the former, the project is rooted in the rural experience, blending the magical world and the mundane on the margins between fiction and documentary.

Source/image: IFFR

Hexham Heads (Mattijs Driesen / Chloë Delanghe, 2024)

As far as northern English Forteana is concerned, the case of the Hexham Heads is right up there with that of the Solway Firth Spaceman; barely 40 miles separate the sites of these bizarre events, which occurred in 1971 and 1964 respectively.  While the Solway Firth incident focused on a picture of what may or may not have been a photobombing alien, the Hexham affair involved something more tangible, namely a pair of stone heads that were unearthed by young brothers Colin and Leslie Robson.  Following the boys' discovery in the back garden of their home, a series of strange goings-on affected both the Robson household and the neighbouring Dodd family; this continued until the heads were offloaded.

While the heads' next custodian, Dr Anne Ross, was able to bring an academic's eye to the party—she was of the opinion that they were artefacts of ancient Celtic origin—her family also experienced the joys of residual haunting; as was the case with the Robsons, domestic order was restored upon the jettisoning of the creepy crania.  The heads' whereabouts are currently unknown, which only elevates a mystery that is now explored in Belgian-British experimental effort Hexham Heads.  Screening today as part of the BFI London Film Festival programme Right in the Substance of Them a Trace of What Happened, this curious, striking work plays like a folk horror run through a filter of stone tape theory.

The medium-length Hexham Heads starts out as a fairly linear endeavour, with co-director Chloë Delanghe's measured voiceover guiding us through the story of the heads' excavation—and subsequent eventful stay—at 3 Rede Avenue, the Hexham property where the Robsons lived; it's a fine précis, one that appears to be setting things up for an investigation into the various paranormal phenomena associated with the noggins.  What follows, however, is a haptic, fragmented piece that conjures a needling atmosphere worthy of such a juicy slice of oddball folklore.  Via an eerie succession of 16mm, VHS and still images, all set to Sam Comerford's unsettling score, the film achieves a cumulative, nightmarish quality.

While the movie's title is undoubtedly prosaic, Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen's treatment of the subject matter is anything but.  Hexham Heads drinks from the same well as Mark Jenkin's Enys Men and Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink—arguably the two most prominent examples of experimental horror in recent years—and like the latter work, it contains a top-class jump scare.  As the film draws to a close, it takes us back to a near-deserted cement plant that was glimpsed fleetingly in the opening scenes, the implication being that there's a pretty mundane explanation for all this.  Still, such airy reassurances count for little in the preceding half-hour, when the fever dream that is Hexham Heads exerts its clammy grip.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI 

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