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

LFF 2026: The Day I Became a Bird (Rob Madden, 2026)

The 2023 short film The Day I Became a Bird distils Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Ruhemann's gift for delicate, emotionally resonant storytelling into a brief but luminous coming‑of‑age tale.  The film follows Frank, a boy who becomes so overwhelmed by his bird-obsessed first crush that he painstakingly constructs an avian-inspired costume, wearing it to school as his feelings outgrow the limits of his small world.  Ruhemann treats this metamorphosis not as fantasy spectacle but as a metaphor for the strangeness of early longing—that sudden sense of becoming other, becoming noticeable, becoming vulnerable.

With its soft visual palette and gentle pacing, the tender film captures the awkward poetry of childhood desire, offering a story that feels both whimsically surreal and quietly, universally true.  The short was made using the Unity engine, and after its release it emerged that Ruhemann's company, Passion Pictures, was working with Dundee indie studio Hyper Luminal on a videogame adaptation of the film.  The finished work is one of five titles featured in the BFI London Film Festival's Games Lounge, which forms part of LFF Expanded and is located in the BFI IMAX, where it is available for the festival's duration.

The four‑chapter game is available on Steam, PlayStation and Nintendo, and I played the Steam version.  I did encounter one notable bug, which caused the game to crash repeatedly at a point where the player is prompted to flip over a school chalkboard.  In the end, the workaround involved temporarily turning the master audio volume all the way down, after which the chapter played out smoothly.  Other than this, there were no performance issues of note.  As the game—like the film—is primarily aimed at younger children, the controls are nice and simple, and can be further streamlined via the menu's accessibility options.

The game sticks closely to both the film's story and its hand‑drawn art style, as Frank undertakes his quest to catch the eye of Sylvia, his dream girl.  As such, it carries the same effortless charm as its source material (which in turn was based on the eponymous book), and its gentle challenges make for a pleasant and relaxing couple of hours.  While you could barrel through the game in under an hour, that approach seems contrary to its mellow sensibilities, which extend to omitting the film's scenes of Frank being picked on by his unthinking classmates.  For such a short game, the RRP is a little steep—although the Steam version includes a download of the film—but it's a title worth picking up at a reduced price.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI