The Headliners (London Film Festival 2024) Feat. Hard Truths, Bird & The End

I love London Film Festival. As soon as the summer rolls around I’m counting down the days until the festival kicks off. My short film V played in the festival in 2017 and being granted a filmmaker’s pass was like finding a golden ticket. We saw over forty films that year — a three week intensive rush of inspiration, flying around Central London, fuelled by coffee and with a hunger to absorb everything on offer. Eventually I started buying an industry pass, booking weeks off of work to be fully immersed in films. For the last two years I haven’t been able to attend due to ongoing problems with Long Covid and those weeks in October stretched to an eternity. This year, with careful planning and a lot of pacing, I was able to return to LFF. I had to abandon an indulgent, carefree approach. I couldn’t run around, I no longer drank caffeine, I masked during every screening and I had to take a whole day’s rest to recover after every venture into Picturehouse Central. And yet, despite my limitations, it meant everything to me to back — to feel the buzz of advance screenings and to be alongside people who live and breathe films. I savoured every movie I watched, with each cinema experience accompanied by a newfound pride in myself for simply being there. Having lost so much of my last two years to this illness, I’ve learned that being there is all I can ask for. I was there at London Film Festival this year and I was rewarded with a variety of stunning films.

It always feels special to get a new Mike Leigh film, and, ironically given the content of Hard Truths, it’s such a joy to see him reunite with Marianne Jean-Baptise. The film follows Patsy (Jean-Baptiste), who rejects life, is disgruntled with her family and picks fights with strangers. I adored Hard Truths as a character study and as an understanding of why so many people in this country cannot connect with what’s around them. Baptiste is phenomenal and Michelle Austin is magic. It’s a film that sparkles with human texture. Leigh’s understanding of people has always made his characters feel like they’ve lived lives outside of the contents of the film. His collaboration with his actors produces rich characters and the whole ensemble shines. Leigh finds so much joy and love amongst the tragedy and pain. The scenes in Chantel’s flat with her children are some of the most organically beautiful and warm in Leigh’s filmography. I already cannot wait to watch this again on general release.

It’s been a long eight year wait since American Honey (one of the best films ever made) to get another Andrea Arnold fiction film to treasure. Arnold is back on home soil with Bird, a coming of age film about Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives in a squat with her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and inattentive father (Barry Keoghan). I cherished Bird for all the usual reasons that make Arnold’s films so defined – her sensibility, her ability to collaborate beautifully with non professional actors and her ability to create films you feel in your body. She’s honestly just one of the best to ever do it. I always walk away from her films feeling more connected to the world around me. I am still thinking about the wonderful performances from Adams and Buda, who shine alongside Keoghan and Franz Rogowski.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s fiction debut The End, a musical that follows a rich family who are living in a salt mine converted into a luxurious home after an apocalyptic event, has split audiences. I seemed to have loved what others hated – that Oppenheimer finds a different kind of spectacle in the musical. There’s no sense of Bob Fosse here, the director forgoes rhythmic cutting for an observational style that is surely influenced by his documentary work and The End is all the more brutal and bleak for it. I almost cannot believe how much sense this makes as a part of Oppenheimer’s body of work. It’s a clear extension of The Act or Killing and The Look to Silence and his continuing interrogation of how people justify atrocities is haunting. Not to say this isn’t without life and colour – it’s dazzling in its own way.

Rungano Nyoni’s much anticipated sophomore feature On Becoming a Guinea Fowl follows Shula (Susan Chardy) after she stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family. Rungano Nyoni’s control of tone is extraordinary, once again crafting a film that seamlessly shifts from comedy to nightmare. I Am Not A Witch was one of those special films that I didn’t quite know how to process when I watched it, before finding that it continued to stay knocking around in my head until I appreciated just how good it was. This time I felt less dazed walking out of the cinema, more sure of instantly recognising Nyoni as a special filmmaker and knowing On Becoming a Guinea Fowl will likely be splintered in my brain for the next few months.

Luca Guadagnino’s incredible output continues with Queer, his adaptation of the William S. Burroughs book of the same name, starring Daniel Craig, whose American expat becomes infatuated with a young student (Drew Starkey) in 1950’s Mexico. It’s been a breath of fresh air watching Guadagnino show off his range in the last ten years and it’s exhilarating watching someone turn it all the way up for Challengers and then effortlessly change tune. Queer is exceptionally crafted, a ravishing production to get lost in. There’s a moment of magic in the middle during a cinema scene which had my heart soaring. I just wish I’d felt for the story in the same way I felt for the technical wizardry and the performances.

It’s hard to describe what it meant to me to finally be back at LFF watching these films. Andrea Arnold and Mike Leigh, in particular, have had such a huge influence on the type of films I want to make. Having these experiences felt like re-connecting with a piece of myself that I had lost. While I wanted to start with the films I knew I was likely to love, I’ve learned over the years that there is so much more to discover at LFF beyond the starry galas and the headline films. Some of my best experiences have been gambling on a film I’ve never heard of or stumbling onto a new obsession after my original choice was sold out. In my continued coverage of LFF, I look forward to spotlighting my favourite new discoveries and tell you how I unexpectedly fell in love with the phenomenal Documentary Competition this year.

Jimmy’s Archive – London Film Festival 2024 – Part One: The Headliners

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