What To Watch - BFI London Film Festival 2022 Selections By NFTS Curation Students

The BFI London Film Festival returns on Wednesday 5th October, bringing some of the most anticipated films and star-studded action to screens across the capital and the UK. Many of the titles screened will already have premiered at festivals around the world - the LFF focuses on a breadth of programming, with 10 venues nationwide offering simultaneous screenings to widen the reach of its output, as well as a virtual festival on BFI Player.

2022 NFTS graduation Documentary Silence directed by Arnas Pigulevičius and produced by Alfred Deragne will enjoy its world premiere and 2022 graduation Animation Curiosa directed by Tessa Moult-Milewska, produced by Sychelle-Kristina Yanda and written by Matthew Dickie will have its UK premiere at the 66th annual festival.

It’s always an exciting time of year for students on the NFTS Film Studies, Programming and Curation MA who have applied their curatorial skills to pick their must see content at this year’s festival. Selecting, programming and reviewing films lies at the heart of their studies, with many of the students aspiring to work as curators and programmers at festivals once they graduate. Read on for our students most highly anticipated and recommended films, taken from a line-up that has garnered praise for its diversity, both in front of and behind the camera. Approximately 41% of the LFF's programme is from female and non-binary directors and creators, with 34% made by ethnically diverse directors or creators.

CHRIS CASSINGHAM
TWITTER @CCASSINGHAM

De Humani Corporis Fabrica | Directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel

What I love about Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s films is their knack for elucidating the details of the world around us in bracing cinematic language. Each project is a clarion call to look inwards, to be hyper-aware of our own positionality in the world. Their newest project, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, similarly turns their gaze inwards to the innermost workings of our bodies and the networks, internal and external, that give them their vitality, lending their outward gaze a new exciting, and no doubt confronting, dimension.

 

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel have been guiding lights in the world of ethnographic documentary for years, and their collaborations in each film yield surprising, textured, and often moving results, whether they be the tearful confession of a lonely sheep-herder in Montana who calls his mother from a mountaintop in 2009’s Sweetgrass; or the distant, supposedly vacant, yet somehow fearful eyes of fish caught off the coast of Massachusetts in 2012’s Leviathan. When their newest film was announced in the London Film Festival line-up, I knew right away that I couldn’t miss it.

Geographies of Solitude | Director Jacquelyn Mills

I’ve had my eye on this film for a while, with little information to go on save for festival summaries. What seems clear is that Mills has a sharp ability to conjure sensitive yet urgent observation. In the case of Geographies of Solitude, she looks at the life and work of Zoe Lucas, an environmentalist and the only full-time inhabitant of the remote Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada. I’m expecting lushness, texture, intimacy, and ideally some solitude, but more so I’m looking forward to the way she synthesises all these pleasures with the harsh, ecological realities that trouble even the most remote parts of the world today.

The United States of America | Director James Benning

Milwaukee, Wisconsin native James Benning may be prolific, but every new film still feels like an event. And for someone like me who had not been introduced to his work until very recently, the occasion of The United States of America is even more special. The film is a revisitation to a short of the same name that he made nearly 50 years ago, which traversed the length and breadth of the United States of America through the back window of his car. This time around, though, Benning has taken his time, refusing to deviate from the pleasures of his static frames that, whether anything moves within them or not, always feel alive and vital, with a staying power you can’t acknowledge until you realise you’re still thinking about them days later.

 

Benning always asks us what this nation is, and what is going on inside it. But as his career lengthens his ability to probe deeper in his answers while simultaneously appreciating the tranquil surfaces of his images is perhaps his greatest achievement.

BRUNO SAVILL DE JONG
TWITTER @BRUNOSAVILLDEJO

Decision to Leave | Director Park Chan-Wook

A man mysteriously falls to his death. A detective (Park Hae-il) investigates the man’s shadowy widow (Tang Wei) to find out what happened, only to find himself falling in love with her.

Decision to Leave looks like a classic erotic thriller, continuing in the tradition of Hitchcock’s Vertigo or Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, where professional law and order becomes perverted by lust and obsession. But acclaimed director Park Chan-Wook – winning Best Director at Cannes for this film - is no stranger to such themes, his macabre masterpieces frequently featuring those irresistibly drawn towards one another despite the taboos that keep them apart. There seems to be a battle inside the Oldboy director; the cynic who sees only the disgusting divisions of humanity and the optimist who cautiously celebrates the remarkable bonds that can still be formed. Beneath his crisp, stylish playfulness are rivers of emotion, displayed in the rightfully acclaimed The Handmaiden but also in lesser-known entries like J.S.A. or I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK!

It remains to be seen which side Decision to Leave falls on – another credo is that Park’s plots can rarely be predicted – but it’s reasonable to assume from its rapturous response from Cannes and its South Korean release that it will be another slickly directed and wonderfully perverse entry from the masterful director.

MASSIMO IANNETTI
INSTA @M_IANNETTI2

Saint Omer | Director Alice Diop

Following her win of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, and returning to LFF after last year’s intimate We (Nous) – a revealing journey on the tracks of a suburban Parisian train and an inquisitive meditation on the idea of today’s France-French filmmaker, Alice Diop’s fictional directorial debut is an abrupt, incisive and skilfully enigmatic offering which uses the power of storytelling to sublimate the real.

Closely inspired by a real-life case which Diop herself witnessed, Saint Omer may appear at first as a quite straightforward courtroom drama about a writer who travels to northern France to follow the trial of Laurence, a young African woman accused of killing her daughter. However, as this encounter prompts questioning that goes beyond the case itself, from being a black woman in France to her role as an observer, Diop slowly lifts the veil on the story of a ghost woman whom nobody knows to diffusely reveal the exact nature of her film. Its opacity and ethereal unfolding is the strength of this imperious yet cryptic work, which cements Diop as a new brilliant talent of contemporary cinema.

The Future Tense | Directors Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor

Featured in the Documentary competition, Irish artists Molloy and Lawlor (aka Desperate Optimists) new essay film promises to be a timely meditation on the idea of being an outsider in a place you call home. After three decades in England, where their now grown-up daughter was born and raised, the filmmaker couple reflect on their time in the country and whether it is time to move on.

A powerful exploration of their own personal migration story with an ingenious investigation of that of their native country, along with a pondering focus on family, national identity and colonialism, The Future Tense presents an intelligent and humorous speculation on the idea of space and place.

Following as a direct prosecution to Further Beyond, filmmakers’ first foray into documentary, Molloy and Lawlor skilfully employ a densely stratified, multi-story method, dissecting the very nature of cinematic language. By straddling both geographic meditations and cinematic malleability, the film unfolds as an experimental piece about two different journeys: one forward to the unknown, one backward to the yet not known.

The United States of America | Director James Benning

In 1975, James Benning and Bette Gordon, two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, filmed their road trips to New York and Los Angeles, with a 16mm camera mounted in the back seat of their car. The resulting 27-minute short film, titled The United States of America, was an intermittent capturing of American landscapes, while the car radio provided information about the worsening situation in Vietnam. Now, almost a half-century later, American landscape documentary master revisits its work with a feature-length ‘remake’ of sorts, expanding the central imagery of the original into a carefully structured yet more spiritual portrait of the nation, a country that does not feel the same depicted in its 1975 counterpart.

From the desolate plains of the Midwest to the urban magniloquence of the coastal metropolises, the 52 static shots of every state in the country - plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico-, which slowly disclose before our eyes, present a view of the United States in all their faded glory. A nation pervaded by an unmistakable sense of loss, yet where a poignant beauty seems always there to be roamed and contemplated.

CHUN CHUN WONG
TWITTER @CHUNCHUN_WONG

Subtraction | Director Mani Haghighi

A new wave of repression has hit renowned filmmakers in Iran lately. Despite all the challenges and obstacles, Iranian cinema has proved its mettle and won major awards at prestigious film festivals throughout the world. The human-centric Iranian films have enthralled global audiences with poetic and allegorical storytelling and documentary-style realism. Directed by maverick auteur Mani Haghighi, Subtraction (Tafrigh) is a noir thriller set in downtown Tehran. A married couple live a painfully ordinary life when they encounter their doppelgängers in the city perpetually battered by rain.

The film is a unique combination of well-trodden political metaphors in Iranian cinema and unexpected novelties amplifying the supernatural elements of the narrative, accompanied by stunning camerawork and a tense score. With powerful yet subtle performances by the two internationally acclaimed Iranian actors Taraneh Alidoosti (The Salesman) and Navid Mohammadzadeh (No Date, No Signature), the film captures the sentiment of living a double life (i.e. a public mask and a private life) in the contemporary Tehran permeated with oppression and anxiety, while leaving room for imagination and reflection. Premiered in the Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival, this spellbinding and thought-provoking film will be essential viewing at the LFF.

ABIGAIL SPIRA

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed | Director Laura Poitras

It seems that Laura Poitras has never been afraid of controversial material in her films. Best known for her Oscar-winning documentary Citizen Four (2014), she boldly captured the life of Edward Snowden, and now she's tackling Big Pharma, this time with an unconventional angle.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a look into the life of renowned photographer Nan Goldin, intercutting her career and life story with her activism work fighting against Big Pharma and the Sackler family. Initially setting out to make a film about protests surrounding the opioid epidemic, Poitras soon became involved with P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), founded by Goldin herself, soon realizing that the real story was at that intersection. The buzz just keeps growing for this film, and for me, it's a definite highlight and priority at this year's festival.

JOSH BULLIN
INSTA & TWITTER @JOSH_BULLIN

Saint Omer | Director Alice Diop

Alice Diop is one of documentary film’s most renowned filmmakers of the last decade, crafting intimate documents of life in the Paris suburbs she grew up in as a means of centering the mostly immigrant communities who are both physically and politically on the peripheries of society.

Saint Omer is her first fiction feature, turning her gaze to the story of a young writer, Rama, who confronts her own traumas when forced to observe the trial of a young woman, Laurence, accused of killing her daughter. Diop’s reputation and the film’s description already put the film on my radar, until its rapturous Grand Jury prize winning debut at the Venice Film Festival in September shot it to must-see status. Reviews assure that Diop loses none of her delicate touch in the transition to fiction, making the film a quiet but revelatory exploration into motherhood, perspective and the continued violence towards black women in France.

Alcarràs | Director Carla Simón

There are few films that carry the gorgeous lyricism and emotional gut-punch that Carla Simón’s astounding debut, Summer 1993 does. The assurance of Simón’s talent then came when her eagerly awaited second feature, Alcarràs premiered at the Berlinale this year, picking up the Golden Bear before it’s finally making its way to the UK at LFF.

The film follows the Solés, a family of peach farmers whose summers of fruit picking look to be coming to an end as they face eviction from the landowners of their orchard. Simon once again captures a melancholic past, but instead ruminates on it from the present, as generations clash while they face an uncertain future. Boasting gorgeous sun-kissed cinematography and a cast of non-professional actors lauded by critics, Alcarràs promises to be a fulfilling and poignant watch which firmly establishes Simón as a leading force in Catalan cinema.

To find out more you can view the full LFF programme here: whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

Find out more about the NFTS Film Studies, Programming & Curation MA!

• Prepares you to build a successful career in film exhibition, programming, criticism or archival work.
• Delivered by film professionals in exhibition and distribution, festivals, archives and film criticism, alongside academics and film makers.
• Run in partnership with the BFI

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