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

LFF 2026: Let Them Be Seen (Nolitha R. Mkulisi, 2026)

The Xhosa‑speaking Eastern Cape of South Africa carries a distinctive rhythm shaped by its landscapes, languages, and long political memory.  Rolling hills give way to villages where isiXhosa is not just spoken but lived—woven into poetry, communal rituals, and everyday negotiations of identity.  It's a region marked by resilience: the birthplace of towering political figures, the site of fierce anti‑colonial resistance, and a place where traditions like cattle‑keeping still anchor community life.  Yet the province is also defined by movement, with many residents navigating the pull between rural homesteads and urban opportunity.

What emerges is a region that feels both rooted and restless, carrying forward a cultural confidence that continues to shape South Africa’s broader story.  Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi's feature debut Let Them Be Seen, which played earlier this year at International Film Festival Rotterdam and screens at the BFI London Film Festival today and tomorrow, is a slippery experimental documentary set in Tapoleng, the Eastern Cape village where the director grew up.  As with fellow LFF 2026 title At Night, Let Them Be Seen finds itself in the Dare strand when it would be rather less surprising to see it housed in the Experimenta section.

Tapoleng is situated near the town of Sterkspruit and close to the Lesotho border, and, like many villages in the region, is characterised by its prevalence of churches—a result of Dutch Reformed Church missionaries greatly expanding their activities in the Eastern Cape from the mid-19th century onwards.  Mkulisi includes frequent shots of these edifices as she essays daily life in Tapoleng, whose residents now look beyond the church buildings that once provided sanctuary as apartheid raged on.  The film also casts its gaze on the village's large cattle population, some of whom return this interest with an inquisitive bovine stare.

Besides these recurring shots of cows and churches, Mkulisi employs a more obscure leitmotif in the form of SABC music show Jam Alley, which is celebrated by a group of brightly wigged women as they endeavour to re-enact moments from the programme.  Mkulisi uses a mind-boggling variety of formats as she captures the essence of this largely forgotten community, for whom the spaza shop serves as a social hub; the countless small interruptions endured by the store's owner as he explains Rastafarianism are almost a running gag in this singular hybrid documentary, which is at once fluid and discordant.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI