It has taken us three weeks, but we have finally put our thoughts in order and prepared a small recap of this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Even in these crisis-stricken times, the event, already in its 54th edition, has been a great success with record number of tickets sold for the nearly 200 titles on offer, the incredible diversity and quality of which often forced us to make some difficult choices in our daily coverage for the Blinkblog.
Beginning with those films we couldn’t watch due to program schedule conflicts; tube chaos and other unexpected obstacles, our most painful misses were this year’s Cannes Grand Jury Prix ‘OF GODS AND MEN’; the strong Oscar contender ‘THE KING’S SPEECH’ – boasting an acclaimed cast headed by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush- and the opening gala’s presentation of ‘NEVER LET ME GO’, based on the best seller by Kazuo Ishiguro.
We also missed two mega-productions: Olivier Assayas’ five hour account of the life of terrorist ‘CARLOS’ aka The Jackal and Raul Ruiz’s equally lengthy ‘MEMORIES OF LISBON’. ‘SUBMARINE’, the directorial debut of TV comedian Richard Ayoade’s from ‘The IT crowd’ and his British counterparts Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan teaming up again with Michael Winterbottom for ‘THE TRIP’ – conceived as a six part TV series for the BBC but also launched in feature film version during the festival.
Other standout titles from around the world were Takeshi Miike’s take on the tradition of the samurai in ’13 ASSASSINS’; the surreal Estonian submission for foreign language Oscar ‘THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY; Kristin Scott-Thomas new French drama, ‘IN YOUR HANDS’, and US comedian Will Ferrell’s going through a register change in the Raymond Carver inspired ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO’; all of them well received. As were a series of high profile documentaries including the festival’s award winner ‘ARMADILLO’; ‘CATFISH’; ‘THE PEDDLER’ and ‘WASTE LAND, highlights among an excellent international selection of documentary work .
All together they would have made a very different, if equally satisfying, viewing experience for us. We did manage, however, to see a large number of excellent pictures; some of the best this year has produced. A look at our favorites, after the jump…