I love October. I’m not one of those loons who goes nuts for Halloween, I don’t own any cat ears and I haven’t worn fishnets since I was about 23 - no, for me, October’s joy is the BFI London Film Festival. It’s not even as if I have time to attend all the events (though I will ABSOLUTELY be at the closing gala screening of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Tale on Sunday night) but the buzz that it creates among London’s film-lovers lasts well beyond the day they roll up the red carpet for another year.
One of the advantages of it is, oddly, that it’s late in the year as film fests go, and not stuffed with premieres, which means that less is at stake for the big movies than at, say, Venice, or Cannes. So all the attendant stars (who this year included everyone’s favourite Hollywood elf Timothée Chalamet, for Bones and All; the magnificent Florence Pugh for The Wonder; Jessica Chastain for her tense thriller The Good Nurse with Eddie Redmayne; and Jennifer Lawrence, confiding at the Q&A for her indie movie Causeway, about a traumatised veteran building a cautious friendship with a troubled mechanic, that she was a bit pissed), can actually enjoy it. Of course the opening film, Matilda, was a premiere, as is fitting - but National Treasure TM Emma Thompson, and Lashana Lynch - playing Miss Trunchbull and Miss Honey respectively - were suitably glorious on their home turf. Basically, in London, it’s more fun.
Ultimately the LFF is a great opportunity for Londoners to see the best of the movies that are yet to be released - and in some cases, mightn’t see the light of day, or at least get much more than an art-house release. I hope Ali Abbasi’s thriller Holy Spider, a fiction based on the story of the Iranian serial killer Saeed Hanaei, will get a decent showing but it’s not likely to pack your local multiplex. Likewise Laura Poitras’s urgent, if messy, documentary on the photographer Nan Goldin (one of my heroes, and not just because we share a name) and her vehement campaign against the branch of the Sackler family, which owned Purdue Pharma, the company behind the opioid crisis in America. It always goes too fast, every year. I wish it lasted the month.
