Parky At the Pictures (10/10/2026)

(An overview of the 70th BFI London Film Festival, 8-18 October )

Britain's second oldest film festival reaches a significant landmark this month. Now sponsored by the British Film Institute, the London Film Festival turns 70 with a programme containing 251 films from 88 countries that will play at various venues across the capital (and a few outside) between 8-18 October. Among the 169 features on view are 16 international premieres and 20 European premieres. As usual, there will be a mix of gala showcases and intimate screenings, as LFF continues its mission to introduce audiences to the best of world cinema.

There's no doubt that the selections have become more commercial over the festival's seven decades. Indeed, while researching an article for another place, it emerged that LFF hasn't opened or closed with a subtitled film since Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine was shown on 21 November 1993. This is a disappointing statistic, even bearing in mind the need for a costly event to drum up attention by staging stellar red carpet photo ops for the print press and the social media outlets that now seem to dictate how the world is run.

LFF70 is bookended by two films with a theatrical theme. Simon Stone's Elsinore is already attracting Oscar buzz for Adam Scott's portrayal of Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who defied AIDS to play Hamlet at the National Theatre in the final weeks of his life. And Julianne Moore is also being mentioned in dispatches for her performance in Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut as Mona Friedman, a New Jersey housewife who auditions for a part in a musical entitled Nosy Neighbours, which is being directed at the Brooks Art Center by the maverick Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti).

Whereas in previous years, this column would have attempted to provide a detailed survey of the entire LFF programme, the approach will be more selective this time, for, as John Lennon said in `Revolution 9': `Everyone of them knew that as time went by they'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower.'

ARTHOUSE.

The Great War provides the setting for Belgian Lukas Dhont's Coward, which charts the relationship between a frightened soldier (Emmanuel Macchia) and the gay man (Valentin Campagne) with whom he stages a revue to boost trench morale. France avoided occupation in the 1914-18 conflict, but conquest in the spring of 1940 led to the imposition of the Vichy regime and Swann Arlaud plays an opportunist seeking to exploit the nation's misery in A Man of His Time, which earned director Emmanuel Marre the prize for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.

The same award at Venice went to Stéphane Brizé's A Good Little Soldier, which centres on the efforts of new human resources manager Alba Rohrwacher to relaunch a health insurance product at the company run by the ruthless Vincent Lindon. Rohrwacher faces another personal crisis in Anna Foglietta's A Common Story, as a working-class mother and her husband (Guido Caprino) begin to drift apart after their daughter leaves home to continue her education.

Having debuted at the same festival, Cédric Kahn's A Place to Heal comes to LFF with a stark docu-realist insight into how abuse victims Lucia (Malou Khebizi) and Eloïse (Zoé Monpart) deal with the arrival of the state psychiatric facility where they are being treated of Enzo (Kenji Peyran), who has been detained for stabbing a social worker. The daughter of concert pianist Catherine Deneuve, Léa Seydoux has made her name with her own brand of classical pop. However, her world is turned upside down in Marie Kreutzer's Gentle Monster, when husband Laurence Rupp is charged with paedophilia by German cop, Jella Haase. Secrets also emerge in Angela Schanelec's My Wife Cries, as crane operator Vladimir Vulević comes to collect spouse Agathe Bonitzer to learn that her dance partner has been killed in a traffic accident.

German star des Tages, Sandra Hüller, headlines two features at LFF2026. She won the Best Actress at Berlin for Markus Schleinzer's Rose, in which she plays a woman disguised as a man who arrives in a 17th-century Protestant village with documents declaring her the heir to an abandone farmstead. But Hüller is equally impressive in Fatherland, a study of the relationship between German author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter, Erika, which earned Pawel Pawlikowski the Best Director prize at Cannes.

Another prominent Polish film-maker tackles a factual literary topic in Małgorzata Szumowska's The Idiot(s), which she has co-directed with cinematographer Michał Englert. Here, the focus falls on Fyodor Dostoevsky (Johnny Flynn), as he honeymoons in Baden-Baden with new wife, Anna (Aimee Lou Wood), and is browbeaten for his lifestyle by fellow author Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel), who is travelleing with a flighty new companion (Vicky Krieps).

The Matochina region of south-eastern Bulgaria provides the setting for Valeska Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure, which sees archaeologist Yana Radeva discover that old friend Syuleyman Alilov Letifov has become involved in people smuggling across the Greek and Turkish borders. Romanian director Teodora Ana Mihai ventures to Belgium for Heysel 85, which recreates the appalling events that saw 39 football fans die at the Brussels stadium hosting the 1985 European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool.

Having adapted Three Floors (2021) from a novel by Eshkol Nevo, Nanni Moretti turns to the Israeli's short story collection, Hungry Heart, for It Will Happen Tonight, which he made a few months after suffering a heart attack. Louis Garrel stars as Matteo, who is married to Thea (Melina Åkerman), but is irresistibly drawn to Greta (Jasmin Trinka) after an unlikely encounter on her wedding day. Interconnected lives are also to the fore in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's La Bola Negra, which was produced by Pedro Almódovar and draws on a play by Federico García Lorca. Focussing on three gay men in 1932 (Milo Quifes), 1937 (Álvaro Lafuente Calvo), and 2017 (Carlos González), the film includes cameos from Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close.

Cruz also appears in Florian Zeller's Bunker, as the book editor wife of 17 years of architect Javier Bardem, who is distracted from a feud with London neighbour Stephen Graham by the chance to build a bunker in Hawaii for Paul Dano's tech billionaire. Bardem also stars in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved, as a film director who hopes that a project with struggling actress daughter, Victoria Luengo, can enable them to reconcile after a troubled past.

Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'or and received a 12-minute ovation from the Cannes audience for Fjord, a fact-based drama that follows Romanian engineer Sebastian Stan and his nurse wife, Renate Reinsve, when they relocate to Norway so their five children can be closer to her famtily. However, teacher Lisa Loven Kongsli notices a bruise during a PE lesson and social services step in.

Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle (1969) provides the inspiration for Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, which has been chosen as France's submission for the 2027 Oscars. It also won the Grand Prix at Cannes for its story about a provincial Russian businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) discovering that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) has been cheating on him. Three further titles in LFF70 have French connections, with the action in Alain Gomis's Dao being divided between ceremonies taking place in Paris and Guinea-Bissau, while Leyla Bouzid's In a Whisper sees Lilia (Eya Bouteraa) fly from the City of Light to the Tunisian town of Sousse in order to attend the funeral of her uncle. Leaving girlfriend Alice ( Marion Barbeau) in a downtown hotel, Lilia comes to suspect that mother Wahida (Hiam Abbas), aunt Heyat (Feriel Chamari), and grandmother Néfissa (Salma Baccar) have something to hide.

Paris and Kyoto provide the settings for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden, an intense 196-minute drama that brings together Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the director of a private care clinic that practices `humanitude', and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese playwright living with cancer. Another close bond is forged in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Look Back, a live-action remake of Kiyotaka Oshiyama's 2024 anime adaptation of a one-shot manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita co-star as the outgoing Fujino and the reclusive Kyomoto, who discover a shared passion for creating manga comic-books.

Set in 1949 and following on from the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One (2023), Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero is the 39th feature in the franchise and centres on former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his wife, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), as the threat posed by Ghidorah makes them wish the kaiju banished to the sea two years earlier would make a timely reappearance.

The action is more sedate in Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice before being chosen as South Korea's submission for the 99th Academy Awards. Bound for Netflix, this drama turns on the uneasy interaction between a laid-off worker and his wife and the film-maker and his partner who are making a documentary about the factory strike that brought a community to its knees.

Moving to Latin America, Mexican Fernando Eimbcke picked up the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin for Flies, which charts the relationship that develops between Olga (Teresita Sánchez) and the nine year-old Christian (Bastián Escobar) after she rents a room to his father, Tulio (Hugo Ramírez), while his wife is in a nearby hospital. Another middle-aged woman forms an unexpected attachment on the Chilean island of Santa Maria in Dominga Sotomayor's La Perra, as Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún) names a puppy after the daughter she never had, only for it to disappear, forcing Silvia to confront the childhood trauma that she had failed to overcome. A rescued street dog played Yuri and won the Palm Dog at Cannes. But we shouldn't overlook the part played by Tormenta the puppy.

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo has made screen history with her debut feature, Ben'imana, as she not only became the first Rwandan to premiere a feature at Cannes (where she won the Caméra d'or), but she has also become the first to be submitted for an Academy Award. Set in 2012, during the final year of the Gacaca hearings following the 1994 Hutu genocide against the Tutsi, the story centres on Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi), a genocide survivor working Kibeho as a mediator for those trying to rebuild their lives, who discovers that her teenage daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe) is pregnant.

Three of this year's five Archive Treasures are subtitled. Jacqueline Vandal plays the 20 year-old getting her first experience of men when she returns from Paris to her family in the south of France in Paula Delsol's La Dérive (1964), while Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah (1972) sees Meena Kumari star as Nargis, the Lucknow tawaif who is prevented from marrying forest ranger Shahbuddin (Ashok Kumar) because of her profession. This film was started in 1956, but Kumari's battle with alcoholism led to delays and her 1964 separation from her director husband. However, Amrohi was keen to finish the picture and completed editing in 1971 after two further years of shooting. Despite requiring two years to persuade the authorities that its satire wasn't overly biting, things went a lot more smoothly on Věra Chytilová's Panelstory, Or How a Housing Development Is Born (1981), which sees the residents of a new housing estate outside Prague being forced to move in, in spite of the fact that construction has yet to be completed.

[MORE TO COME]

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