London Film Fest Head on World Premieres, the Post-Strikes Return of Stars, Plus the Strong Showing for Brazil, Animation

Kristy Matheson is gearing up for the 68th BFI London Film Festival (LFF), her second as the BFI fest’s director.

The Australian, who previously programmed the Edinburgh Film Festival, and her team have selected a total of 255 titles from 80 countries, mixing such highlights from this year’s fest circuit as Sean Baker’s Cannes-winning Anora, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice and Edward Berger’s Conclave, with 40 world premieres.

Among those are the likes of WWII drama Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson and more, the third LFF-opening movie from London-born Steve McQueen that kicks off the fest on Oct. 9, Ben Taylor’s Joy, starring Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton and Bill Nighy in the story of the team that invented IVF, and Netflix’s animated That Christmas, directed by Simon Otto and starring Brian Cox as the voice of Santa Claus, as well as Jodie Whittaker, Fiona Shaw and Bill Nighy.

The Pharrell Williams LEGO biopic Piece by Piece will close the 68th edition of the festival on Oct. 20.

Matheson, who succeeded new Berlin Film Festival director Tricia Tuttle as the head of the LFF, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about what went into putting together her sophomore edition, new countries represented and the importance of star power.

LFF 2024 will feature 255 titles from 79 countries, including the world premieres of 16 features. What are some of the key world premieres?

To be able to open the festival with Steve McQueen’s Blitz is amazing, and to have that as a world premiere is such a cherry on top. There are other terrific world premieres, such as an Irish film called Four Mothers [from director Darren Thornton], which is very emotional, but also very comedic and beautifully acted. It’s one of those films that really has broad appeal. You don’t want people to let it slip under their radar, because it’s a really joyful film to experience.

In competition, we have another film called The Extraordinary Miss Flower, which is from Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard who made 20,000 Days on Earth, the Nick Cave documentary. Again, they bring this intense creativity to how they tell the story of someone’s life through documentary.

We don’t have a formal market here at the London Film Festival, but London itself is such a great place for people to platform their films, not just in preparation for an awards run, but also for film teams and distributors looking to really road test films in front of audiences, because we have such strong and adventurous audiences here in London. It’s also a very effective place for people to come and do business because it doesn’t have to be a long trip to get a lot done.

We’re an audience-facing festival. So when we put the program together, we’re thinking about the whole program. We certainly are very honored and excited to launch films into the world. But that’s not the only metric for us to think about. We really want the program to be very appealing to lots of different audience members, so that’s guiding our decision-making.

Are there any themes or genres that are particularly well represented across the LFF lineup?

Animation is huge this year. We’ve had the pleasure of seeing lots of terrific animation films, and not all for young audiences. We do have some great films for young audiences and families, such as That Christmas and The Wild Robot. So, animation is knocking it out of the park.

We also have lots of different types of animation, from Adam Elliot’s beautiful Annecy winner, Memoir of a Snail, which is gorgeous, handcrafted claymation, right through to the very sophisticated Lego 3D that you see in our closing night film, Piece by Piece. There’s a gorgeous film from the Dominican Republic called Olivia & the Clouds, which is another different type of animation style. So, people who love animation will find a lot.

The other thing that has been charming us all the way through the lineup is animals, which abound in our program this year. There are so many great animal performers, stars, and heroes in movies across the board. As we went along, we kept saying: “Oh, look, it’s another animal film.” We have the terrific film, Pepe [about a hippo once owned by Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar]. We were all thinking about who our favorite animals are, and Pepe is definitely up there. For me, it’s our favorite hippo.

A lot of those films are looking at our connection to the world, how humans and animals coexist. How do we enrich each other’s lives? But some of those films are also looking at more of that philosophical relationship between the animal and the human world. Some of them are looking at things from a more environmental perspective, such as the animation Flow, which has an entirely animal cast. It’s looking at at how we need to relate in an interspecies way and look at what we need to do in order to survive.

Any other big philosophical themes or focus topics across the LFF lineup?

I’d say motherhood in all of its many guises. We’ve got a great film called Motherboard, a wonderful documentary from here in the U.K. about a woman [Victoria Mapplebeck] who’s documented her life as a mother and documented her child, which is very moving and an interesting examination. We also have something all the way up to Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch with Amy Adams, which is a whole other kind of examination of motherhood, but something that I think most people who are parents of young children or who have that memory will be able to really connect with.

And another thing that’s been really pleasing this year is to see a couple of films that feature disability but don’t necessarily have it at the forefront as the theme. There’s a French film called My Everything, starring Laure Calamy by Anne-Sophie Bailly, and there’s an Australian comedy called Audrey [by director Natalie Bailey]. Both of those films feature disabled characters who are just part of the makeup of the film. And in them, we see professional actors who are disabled playing those roles. Both films really help normalize disability. It’s not about people making a point, it’s just that these are great performers doing wonderful work in them.

How is the speakers and other events lineup of LFF different this year?

What’s very exciting is that we have a much more robust lineup of Screen Talks, meaning we have more opportunities this year for people to meet and have that more intimate moment and hear someone talk about their careers.

Is the more robust speaker lineup, including the likes of Zoe Saldaña, Daniel Kaluuya, and Lupita Nyong’o, because last year was so difficult with the strikes?

Certainly, in terms of the talents that are coming, we’re really proud of the impressive and eclectic lineup. But obviously, with the strikes last year, there wasn’t an opportunity to hear from talents in front of the camera, so it’s great to be able to invite performers back to speak to audiences. Lupita Nyong’o is a voice actor in The Wild Robot, which is just a whole other dimension and a different type of acting that we’ll talk about with her along with her whole career. The same is true for Zoe Saldaña with Jacques Audiard’s Emelia Pérez. If you’ve been following her career, you might not think this film is the next natural step. So, it’ll be fascinating for us to be able to hear how she’s journeyed through her career.

Are there any countries represented with films at LFF for the first time?

Not for the very first time, but we have a film from Indonesia called Crocodile Tears, which is a terrific first feature, even if not the first time we’ve screened a film from Indonesia. It’s a really interesting story of a mother and son, another film about motherhood, but with a very different tack. And the film is playing with genre in a really interesting way.

From Singapore this year, again a country that is not a first-time addition to the LFF, but not one that we see a lot of films from, we also have a great film that was just in Venice and is called Stranger Eyes, which is a slow-burn thriller [about a young couple dealing with the sudden disappearance of their baby daughter and looking for clues about the kidnapper].

And then another film, Small Hours of the Night from Daniel Hui [which the LFF website describes as “a somber chamber piece that implores us to find connections between divergent acts of political dissidence across history]. So, I think Southeast Asia in general is well represented this year. There are some terrific films from Vietnam, and we saw a lot of terrific films from South East and East Asia this year, but particularly Southeast Asia felt quite exciting.

The Dominican Republic also makes a really strong showing. We’ve got a wonderful film called Sugar Island [directed by Johanné Gómez Terrero and about the complex past, present and future lives of Afro-Dominican people in the Dominican Republic], Pepe [from Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias], and the animated Olivia & the Clouds. They are not all the same types of films: an animation, a more experimental film, a drama. It’s nice to see the diversity of filmmaking styles.

And Brazil also has a great showing this year. And again, they are all very different in terms of filmmaking styles and topics they are dealing with. [They include Brazil’s Oscar contender by director Walter Salles, I’m Still Here, Julia de Simone’s Formosa Beach, Marcelo Caetano’s Baby, Juliana Rojas’ Cidade; Campo, and Marco Dutra’s Bury Your Dead].

[On Oct. 11, the London fest will even put on “DJ Night: Ritmos do Brasil,” described as “a night of the very best Brazilian music to complement the breadth of Brazilian films in this year’s festival.”]

Tell me a bit about the thematic strands that the festival uses to attract audiences in new ways and structure the LFF lineup. They range from Love, Debate and Laugh to Thrill, Cult, Family, Experimenta and more.

The strands are really very helpful for us when we’re programming the festival because it just means that we have to keep a check on ourselves. We might indulge a bit and be like, “Oh, here’s another sad, moody film.” Or we might indulge and say we just want to watch lots of fun comedy films. So it’s good for us.

And it can help the audience try and decipher such a big program by giving a bit of a guideline, depending on their own and their friends’ tastes and moods. Thrill, I think, is a really good example. In that section, we have everything from your very traditional thrillers right through to a slow-burn film like Stranger Eyes. You could place that film in lots of different places. For example, it could also sit in Dare, because it’s quite formally daring. It could sit in Debate because it brings up a lot of questions. But for us, the strands are a way to get an audience member to take a chance on something they don’t know. Someone might say “Oh, I love thrillers.” Or “I’m going to the festival with a friend, and they really like those kinds of films.” So, we hope the strands offer a bit of a guide to help navigate the festival.

Some strands are quite broad…

Yes, such as love. I mean, so many films are about love. We love love in the movies. But you know, this year we put Alex Ross Perry’s film Pavements in Love, which may seem like an odd place to put it. It could have easily gone into Create because it is about the creative process and about people who are making things. But what really struck us when we watched the film was that it is really a love letter to fandom. Fandom is something that we all engage with, in different ways and on different levels, but the film is a total love letter to the band Pavement. So, yes we’re making strands broad enough to try and appeal to many different tastes and stop us from being too indulgent.