15/18 (Cédric Kahn, 2026)

In France, psychiatric care for young people aged 15 to 18 is provided through a combination of hospital services, specialist adolescent mental health units, outpatient clinics, and community-based support programmes.  Treatment is designed to address a wide range of conditions, including anxiety disorders, depression, eating disorders, and behavioural difficulties, while recognising the unique challenges faced by adolescents.  Mental health professionals often work closely with families, schools, and social services to create coordinated care plans that fully support both recovery and educational development.

In recent years, growing awareness of adolescent mental health needs has contributed to ongoing discussions about improving access to specialised services and reducing waiting times for treatment.  Cédric Kahn's wonderfully empathetic new film 15/18 (AKA A Place to Heal) is set in an adolescent psychiatric facility, and stands as one of the finest works in this mercurial director's filmography.  15/18 features a notable supporting turn from Sophie Guillemin, the star of Kahn's excellent, and controversial, 1998 drama L'ennui, but this new film is very much an ensemble piece, one in which the predominantly young cast shine.

After being found by the police in Belgium, 17-year-old runaway Lucia (Malou Khebizi) is returned to the adolescent psychiatric ward she knows all too well.  There, she reunites with her friend Eloïse (Zoé Monpart), meets a new group of young patients, and becomes fully immersed in the rhythms of life on the ward.  Under the care of Etienne (Kahn) and his overworked team, patients and caregivers forge meaningful connections that offer comfort and hope amid difficult circumstances.  The careful balance they maintain, however, is thrown into doubt with the arrival of Enzo (Kenji Peyran), a surly, unpredictable newcomer.

As we might reasonably expect, Enzo becomes an agent of change, but few will predict the startling left turn Kahn's film takes as it heads towards its conclusion.  15/18's unforeseen ending nonetheless marks a watershed moment for one of its young protagonists, as does the film's singularly most moving scene, which takes the form of an emotional goodbye from a patient ready to begin a new chapter in life.  While the film is not above dealing in well-established medical tropes (the green intern, the weary-but-kindly consultant), it beautifully illuminates the painful struggles faced by teenagers with mental health issues.

Darren Arnold

Images: Ad Vitam

70th BFI London Film Festival (7–18/10/26)

The 70th BFI London Film Festival closed on Sunday 18th October with the UK Premiere of Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, attended by the writer and director alongside the star of the film Julianne Moore.  The Closing Night Gala took place at the Royal Festival Hall, which returned as the festival's Gala venue for a sixth time since its inaugural year in 2021.  LFF Director Kristy Matheson said: "It was joyful to witness a community come together over 12 days of screenings and events to celebrate our 70th birthday.  Across the UK, audiences flocked to their local cinemas for LFF on Tour while London audiences enthusiastically embraced the programme, recording their highest ever levels of attendance [173,443]."

Festival goers were once again invited to vote in the Audience Award for Best Feature Film and Audience Award for Best British Discovery.  Following the vote, the genre-defying queer epic La bola negra, directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, was chosen as the Audience Award for Best Feature Film.  Rooted in the legacy of writer Federico García Lorca, the film had its Gala screening on 8th October at the Royal Festival Hall, introduced by directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo and stars Penélope Cruz, Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau.  Grace Harper Brighouse's Dependence, an intimate study of what it means to love an addict, was voted the winner of the Audience Award for Best British Discovery.

The 70th edition welcomed more than 1000 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives and their teams to present their work at venues across the capital.  The festival kicked off with the European Premiere of Simon Stone's Elsinore, attended by cast members Andrew Scott, Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Monica Dolan and Johnny Flynn.  The festival featured a range of 258 titles (comprising features, shorts, series and immersive works) hailing from 87 countries and featured 249 languages, with 43% of works from female filmmakers.  All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 33 World Premieres.

LFF Expanded returned this year for its sixth edition, with nine projects spanning immersive art, virtual reality, AI and video gaming.  The Games Lounge also returned to BFI IMAX with five international titles: TearyHand Studio's ...and Roger, an interactive visual novel exploring the experience of dementia; The Day I Became a Bird, a hand-drawn interactive story from Passion Pictures and Hyper Luminal Games; Unrelated Studio's puzzle adventure Lofsöng; brlka's gravity-shifting platformer Love Eternal; and Mixtape by Beethoven and Dinosaur, which follows three friends on one last adventure together, set to a soundtrack from artists including Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, and Joy Division.

The 71st BFI London Film Festival will take place from 6–17 October 2027.

Source/images: BFI

LFF 2026: The Blood Countess (Ulrike Ottinger, 2026)

The Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, or Erzsébet Báthory, lived during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and remains one of the most controversial figures in European history.  Born into the influential Báthory family, she managed extensive estates while her husband, Count Ferenc II Nádasdy, was away on military campaigns.  Following accusations that she had abused and murdered numerous young women under her authority, an investigation was launched by Hungarian officials, leading to her confinement in Csejte Castle in late 1610, where she died less than four years later.

Although stories about her crimes later inspired legends portraying her as one of history's most notorious serial killers, historians continue to debate the reliability of the evidence and the extent to which political motivations may have influenced the allegations against her.  There have been many attempts to bring Báthory's life to the big screen, with the pick of the bunch undoubtedly being Belgian director Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness, a 1971 Ostend-set chiller that starred Delphine Seyrig as the countess.  With her LFF-selected The Blood Countess, Ulrike Ottinger becomes the latest filmmaker to tackle Báthory's gory story.

As with Lucile Hadžihalilović's hypnotic The Ice Tower—a film that drew inspiration from Daughters of Darkness—The Blood Countess' opening title card uses a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-inspired font to set the tone as Isabelle Huppert's Báthory, clad head-to-toe in red, glides through a Viennese underground lake.  Báthory is in Austria to track down a mysterious book with the power to end a vampire's immortality, a tome that surely spells disaster for Elizabeth and her fellow sanguivores.  Cue an odyssey across Vienna, during which Báthory is aided by her loyal handmaiden Hermine (Downfall's Birgit Minichmayr).

Ottinger's splendidly mounted film is broadly played for laughs, and the whole enterprise, unsurprisingly, revolves around the predictably terrific Huppert, whose casting in this Luxembourgish co-production seems almost too obvious.  And that's before we consider that Seyrig once played Báthory, Ottinger directed Seyrig in Joan of Arc of Mongolia, and Huppert played the younger version of Seyrig's character in Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse.  It may have taken the octogenarian Ottinger many years to bring her take on the Báthory legend to cinemas, but the result is one of this singular filmmaker's least forbidding works.

Darren Arnold

Images: Neue Visionen