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  1. Culture
13 September 2011updated 17 Jan 2024 6:52am

Gilbey on Film: A guide to the London Film Festival

Here's a tip - take a risk and avoid the big names.

By Ryan Gilbey

This is a sad year for the London Film Festival, which bids farewell to Sandra Hebron, the energetic and inspired artistic director who has overseen (and improved) the LFF since 2003. It appears that responsibility for the festival is to come under the remit of BFI Southbank. Does that sound like madness to anyone else? As Hebron herself wrote in 2008: “There’s a lovely notion that we somehow knock the festival together in a couple of months, whereas in fact we spend January through to August selecting the programme, and the whole year planning.” Of course, Hebron’s departure comes in the context of hard times at the BFI, which we have already reported. All good things are eventually butchered beyond recognition by funding cuts, as the saying goes.

The programme for this year’s festival has just been published, and I have managed to find time to select ten promising highlights, in between picking through the brochure’s pages searching for obscene acrostics aimed at Ed Vaizey.

To anyone looking to make their festival-going as cheap and profitable as possible, I would offer the same advice as usual, born out of attending the LFF while a penniless student: steer clear of most things safe and starry, since those films are bound to (a) already have a distributor and (b) already have a release date, often not long after their festival screening. With tickets running to as much as £14 (or £18 for galas), why bother shelling out to see We Need to Talk About Kevin or The Black Power Mixtape 1967 — 1975, which open several days after playing at the festival? (It’s also worth noting that other high-profile festival selections such as Anonymous, The Ides of March, The Future, Wuthering Heights and the closing night film, Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, open within a month of the LFF ending.)

Take a risk instead on something from the selection below. Booking opens to BFI members on 14 September, and on 26 September for everyone else.

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This Is Not a Film
The director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Offside) has been banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government for 20 years, and is currently serving a six-year prison sentence. His latest film, shot entirely inside his own apartment and with Panahi before rather than behind the camera, was screened at Cannes only after being smuggled into France on a USB stick buried inside a cake and posted from Iran.

Faust
Aleksander Sokurov’s take on the Faust legend won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion this month. Accepting the award, he had a message that the coalition government would do well to hear: “Culture is not a luxury! It is the basis for the development of the society.”

I’m Carolyn Parker Into the Abyss — a Tale of Life, a Tale of Death Whores’ Glory
Three documentaries. The first, directed by Jonathan Demme, follows a New Orleans woman attempting to return home in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the second, Werner Herzog interviews two men on death row. And in the third, which won the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize at Venice, Michael Glawogger contrasts three examples of prostitution in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico.

Lawrence of Belgravia
A profile of the eccentric Brummie singer-songwriter Lawrence Heyward, lynchpin of the bands Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart, has been responsible for some of the wittiest, most exciting music in recent British pop. Easily the equal of a Jarvis Cocker or a Morrissey, he is an outcast whose mysteries will likely remain intact even after this documentary.

Crulic — the Path to Beyond Dreams of a Life
Moving to the outer fringes of documentary, these two features suggest something of the stylised investigations of The Arbor or Waltz with Bashir. Crulic — the Path to Beyond is an animated feature narrated from beyond the grave by a Romanian man who died on hunger strike in a Polish prison; the picture assembles the pieces of this factual case. The British feature Dreams of a Life also does some detective work of its own to conjure a portrait of a woman whose body had lain undiscovered in her London flat for three years.

Rampart
Two reasons why expectations are high for this thriller about a violent cop resisting expulsion: first, the screenplay was co-written by James Ellroy; second, it reunites actor Woody Harrelson and director/co-writer Oren Moverman, who worked so compellingly together on The Messenger.

This Must Be the Place
I have yet to be convinced of the talents of the Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Family Friend, Il Divo). But stills of a back-combed, near-unrecognisable Sean Penn, who plays a reclusive rock star hitting the road, not to mention the prospect of a David Byrne score and cameo appearance, have convinced me to give Sorrentino another chance.

The London Film Festival runs from 12-27 October

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