London Film Festival 2025

London Film Festival 2025

It’s been six years since I last went to the London Film Festival from start to finish. There’s just not as much here for me to get excited about as there used to be, so I tend to just dip in and out, catching the train into the city a couple of times to see one or two movies before heading home again. This has always been a festival that prioritises star-studded gala screenings over interesting and unusual cinema, but the pickings in that regard seem to get slimmer every year. I don’t really have it in me to pay three times the price of a normal ticket to see something like Ballad of a Small Player a week or two before it turns up on Netflix, and so my festival has become quite small. Having spent several years traipsing around central London for two weeks every October just to cram it all in, this year I managed to fit pretty much all of what I wanted to see into two Saturday afternoons. 

All of this is to say that I only really want to watch something at a festival if I’m going to struggle to see it outside of one. I can’t think of a film that fits into this philosophy more appropriately than Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a three-hour film shot on the 3.2 megapixel camera of a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. A film of absences, in which a man, Irakli, searches in vain for his missing daughter, Lisa, across the vast expanses and abandoned football pitches of the Georgian countryside, accompanied by Levani, her best friend who, without explanation, happens to be invisible. Many of the people they meet are heard but not seen, with Koberidze framing empty reverse shots as if they’re filled with faces. This is one of several leaps of faith demanded by Dry Leaf. The heavily pixelated images are muddy and difficult to make sense of, much like this circuitous search, which keeps hitting dead ends. Koberidze builds an impressionistic patchwork of people and places that evokes the sensation of a dream. Remembered details, like cats and donkeys and apricots, empty village squares and acts of kindness, serve to emphasise the spaces left by the things he’s forgotten, like the faces of the people he meets, or the indistinguishable football pitches that seem to blend into one. But there’s a melancholic longing to fill these spaces. On the road, Irakli often sees kids wanting but unable to find anywhere to play football, while the pitches that serve as landmarks for his search remain overgrown and reclaimed by nature. At one such encounter, a child asks Irakli to help push a heavy goalpost into the ground so they can play. He does, and they do. Dry Leaf suggests that while some things may be gone, they don’t have to stay that way. The act of trying to find them is exactly what keeps them alive.

Claire Denis’s The Fence covers a similar kind of search, only its conclusion is already written. In an unnamed West African country, a man appears at a construction site in the dead of night to recover the body of his brother, only to be met with evasion and resistance from the white foreman and his volatile deputy. Based on a play, the theatricality of The Fence largely works in its favour. These two men stand in spotlights and perform to an audience that already sees through them, from the man himself, patiently asking the same questions, to the armed guards in lookouts above, to the men who work in the kitchen, and even the recently arrived wife of the foreman, whose red dress and high-heels clash awkwardly with the dusty terrain and chain-link fences around her. These loud voices echo across the silent yard and through paper-thin walls. There’s no privacy here, no secrets. Just a series of distractions, and the desperate hope that they can get rid of this man before his quiet insistence becomes a problem for them. 

This defensive impulse echoes through Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, too, in which a university professor in Brazil in the late seventies is forced to run from corrupt political forces who will do anything to get him out of their way and siphon off his research funding. He’s given refuge in a small community while he waits for a chance to flee the country, but the threats against him, at first vague and unseen, gradually take concrete form. Mendonça Filho allows information to slowly coalesce over time, with scattered characters, contexts, and motivations eventually colliding in a single time and space. A film about hiding, or, more specifically, of being hidden, The Secret Agent continues Mendonça Filho’s interest in both the myriad pleasures of genre cinema and the communities that form when people stand up against political and bureaucratic aggression. But also, it builds upon the idea of the archive, of piecing together all the disparate angles of an event in an effort to make sense of it.

In Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi similarly presents fragments of information and asks that meaning be drawn from them. Not as a means of understanding specific events but as a way of finding parallels in the echoes of history. The film takes place in the same location, the botanical gardens of a German university, across three different time periods. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives to teach a course but is left marooned in the deserted university by the onset of the pandemic. In the 1970s, two students study how a geranium experiences and responds to its environment. And in the early 1900s, a young woman overcomes institutional and societal sexism and uses her skills as a photographer to study an assortment of plants. Enyedi cuts back and forth between these time periods on shared moments, like reading the same pages of a book in the library, or touching the bark of the same enormous tree in the gardens, focusing on the act of study and, more significantly, the connections that emerge from these studies. A neuroscientist reaching out to a French botanist over Zoom, a young woman helping an old photographer with his work between classes, and two students falling for one another via a shared interest in flowers. Enyedi has been exploring these kinds of awkward meetings in her work for decades, be it the reunion of separated twins in My Twentieth Century (1989), the frustrating missed connections in Tamas and Juli (1997), or the dreamed encounters in On Body and Soul (2017). In Silent Friend, it’s the simple fact that these people have been pulled together in the first place that’s most of interest. As long as there are spaces that encourage such things, there will always be people willing to devote themselves to solving the endless mysteries of the world, and work together to make sense of things they cannot explain on their own. Silent Friend is a gentle love letter to these spaces, to this quiet university garden, filled with rare plants and the enduring ginkgo tree that echoes through each time period, that has given those curious enough to do so the means of understanding the world for more than a century. For Enyedi, curiosity is natural.

London Film Festival 2016 | Aquarius, Personal Shopper, Sweet Dreams

London Film Festival 2016 | #5

The past and the present are not mutually exclusive. We all have memories of time shared with people we love, people we have loved, people we will always love. Our memories are who we are. They’re proof that we exist. And we have lives. We love, we work, we eat, drink, talk, spend time. We move towards the unknown of our future. We live. But what happens when all we can see is the past, our memories of the people and places that no longer have a future? How do we live our lives without them? Such questions are posed in three superb films I saw at the London Film Festival, all of which explore the past’s hold over us in profoundly different ways.

First off: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. Opening in Recife in the 1980s before jumping ahead to the present day, Aquarius follows Clara, a retired music critic, as she fights to keep her home out of the hands of bullish property developers. Having bought out every other resident of the titular apartment complex, these developers plan to demolish the building and rebuild the “New Aquarius”, a modern and luxurious living space, in its place. But they need Clara to leave so they can start work. They can’t evict her. She owns her apartment, so as long as she stays they can’t do a thing but try to force her to go. And the deal they offer her is a good one: a lot more than the asking price. But for Clara, this isn’t about money. This is her home. She raised her children here with her late husband. She beat breast cancer here. Her family have been here for decades. She can’t just leave, knowing that the physical space her memories are tied to will be destroyed if she goes. She’s holding on to the past because it’s hers to hold on to. It’s an act of preservation. Like how she defends digital music in spite of her love of vinyl. The resonance of a song is not lost because it’s heard as a file on an iPod. At least it’s the same music. But tearing down a building and replacing it with a new one is a cover version. It might exist in the same place, with the same name, but its soul will be lost, leaving nothing but a hole filled with money in a city where life used to be.

Mendonça steeps Clara’s life in history: a John Lennon LP she bought second hand in Brazil mysteriously contains a clipping of an LA Times profile of Lennon conducted shortly before his death; a chest of drawers, repeatedly observed, is closely associated with memories of her beloved late aunt, who owned it as a young woman; the bookshelves of her apartment are stacked with photographs and photo albums; even the scars from her mastectomy serve as a daily reminder of her cancer battle. This is richly detailed, perhaps even novelistic filmmaking. Mendonça takes the time to create a vivid sense of Clara’s life by zooming in on the details that make it real, that make it important, beautiful, essential. And life is meaningless without its history. If our past is taken away from us, destroyed and rebuilt in the name of a future that’s leaving us behind, how do we know that we even lived at all?

“I need more from you.” These words said to a gushing tap cut to the heart of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, a beguiling ghost movie in which Maureen, an American spirit medium working as personal shopper to an elusive socialite in Paris, searches for a promised sign of (after)life from her dead twin brother. She spends her days riding around the city on a moped collecting clothes and jewellery from designer boutiques, and her nights drawing, reading, teaching herself about art, and talking to her boyfriend on Skype as she sits alone in her tiny apartment. He wants her to join him in Oman. She hates her job, and being in Paris. There’s nothing keeping her here but her memories of her brother. But she feels obliged to stay until he gives her a sign: a ghostly encounter, a tap inexplicably gushing water, a glass smashing on its own; unexplained noises, scratched crosses appearing on walls. And then she receives a barrage of mysterious and insistent text messages from an unknown number. Is this the sign she’s in Paris waiting for?

Maybe. And that’s exactly the point. She wants to believe, so she does. She’s waiting. And when you wait, you look at everything with the expectation that something is about to happen, something to justify all this lost time. Maureen needs something from her brother so she chooses to believe that he’s speaking to her, somewhat reluctantly following the instructions of the bizarre messages in spite of all corporeal logic. But then anything can be explained rationally. A glass smashing on the floor with no apparent stimulus could’ve been caught in an unnoticed gust of wind, or maybe it was placed precariously on the edge of a table. And these texts could be an elaborate practical joke, or part of something more cynical. But they might also not be. Assayas, to his credit, never really clarifies any of this. He’s happy to let Maureen exist in a world of grey in which there are no definites. Even communication is increasingly shrouded in mystery: face-to-face meetings become lo-res Skype conversations; handwritten notes become text messages from unknown numbers; IRL becomes URL. Maureen is always connected to the world and always alone in it. Glued to her phone and stuck in a city that isn’t her home, Maureen’s physical connections are all a distant part of her past. It makes sense, then, that she chooses to believe in ghosts. That she asks questions to empty rooms, hoping for an answer to fill the silence. What else is there to do in a digital world but look for signs of life.

In Marco Bellocchio’s Sweet Dreams, Massimo, a successful journalist, returns to his childhood home to sort through the possessions of his mother, who died when he was young. It’s 1999 in Turin, and the looming presence of the abandoned Stadio Comunale, the former home of both Juventus and Torino FC, looms large through the window. In his youth, this stadium roared as his beloved Torino played. He gave spirited mock-commentaries from the balcony. The team photos (still) adorn his childhood bedroom wall. But the place that ignited his life is now overgrown and rotting. In 2006, the stadium was renovated and Torino FC returned. Bad situations can have silver linings, but this isn’t 2006. It’s 1999. The positives haven’t been drawn yet. There’s just crumbling concrete, wasted ground. Lost history.

Of course, the same can be said of Massimo’s lost relationship with his mother, the woman who encouraged him to dance around the living room with her, who watched scary movies with him in the middle of the night, who snuck into his room as he slept to wish him “sweet dreams”. He was never told how she really died. His whole life is built around her unfathomable absence. Bellocchio jumps backwards and forwards around Massimo’s life to remove any sense of it as a linearly experienced thing, instead viewing everything through the prism of his memories of his mother. She’s a ghost, haunting every second of his life, in whatever order it’s experienced. His rise to prominence as a journalist; his time at school; his blossoming romance with a doctor; his troubled relationship with his father. She’s there, even if only peripherally. Hopeful and unreciprocated glances up at a row of mothers cheering his classmates through a swimming lesson; reluctant-then-uncontrollable dancing to The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird; breathlessly watching as his girlfriend jumps from a ten metre diving board. All moments implicitly loaded with the grief and confusion of having lost his mother. “Let her go,” Massimo’s girlfriend tells him one night, before Bellocchio jumps back once more to his childhood. He and his mother are playing hide and seek. Massimo looks and looks but can’t find her — she’s in a cardboard box in a dark cupboard, but Massimo looks right past her. Panicked and crying out for his mother, she finally rushes from the cupboard to comfort him, inviting him back to her hiding place. They sit in the dark, away from the world, alone together and happy. Nothing lost is gone forever. Memories, good or bad, are always beautiful, so how could we let them go? They’re proof that we’re alive.