London Film Festival 2021 Round Up
What I watched at this year's LFF.
For most film lovers the past year has probably given plenty of opportunity to catch up on missed content and older films you’ve always wanted to see but have never gotten around to watching. That wasn’t quite the case for me personally, I did pretty much everything but watch films…
Then came the news that this year London Film Festival was going ahead, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to actually do what I say I love most – watch some movies!
I was very excited about the hybrid virtual / physical event as it meant I could work around my mobility issues and still watch some great films which I did, but there definitely needs to be a discussion about making film festivals more accessible, or just making film more accessible period but that’s another newsletter for a different day.
So, here’s all of the films I managed to watch:
Mothers of the Revolution (dir. Briar March)
Les Enfants Terribles (dir. Ahmet Necdet Cupur)
Drive My Car (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
White Building (dir. Neang Kavich)
Language Lessons (dir. Natalie Morales)
Luzzu (dir. Alex Camilleri)
The Lost Daughter (dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Ali and Ava (dir. Clio Barnard)
Boiling Point (dir. Philip Barantini)
Mass (dir. Fran Kranz)
All These Sons (dir. Bing Liu, Joshua Altman)
Wild Indian (dir. Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.)
The Neutral Ground (dir. CJ Hunt)
La Mif (dir. Fred Baillif)
Leave No Traces (dir. Jan P. Matuszynski)
Welcome to Spain (dir. Juan Antonio Moreno Amador)
Queen of Glory (dir. Nana Mensah)
Dashcam (dir. Rob Savage)
Ear for Eye (dir. debbie tucker green)
And here are my standout films. Turns out I had a lot of them.
Ali and Ava
Synopsis: Two Bradford residents, an Asian man, and a white woman, develop and unlikely friendship which evolves into a relationship that is tested along the way by differing cultures and their families.
My Thoughts: This was definitely the film I smiled the most in while watching. Everything about this was pretty perfect to me. The music – bass heavy dance club music – isn’t really my style but I couldn’t help but love it in this film. It always fit and never seemed like too much even when the scene would switch from deathly quiet to pounding bass. What I loved about this film was that, while it was a romantic drama, to me, it felt even more about the connection music lets us have with each other and ourselves. Oh, and it was hilarious, the whole cinema was laughing out loud!
Luzzu
Synopsis: Set in Malta, a struggling fisherman decides to enter a black-market fish trading business in order to support his family.
My Thoughts: Luzzu was a simple film which I mean in the best way. The plot was straightforward, and it wasn’t bogged down with symbolism and metaphors which was so welcome after some of the more complex dramas programmed in the festival. It was a bittersweet story and quite different to most films that have a clear-cut happy ending. This wasn’t originally on my watchlist but I’m really glad I did end up watching it.
The Lost Daughter
Synopsis: A woman vacationing on a Greek island alone becomes enamoured with a young mother and her daughter and relives her own experiences of motherhood and her relationship with her (ex?) husband and children.
My Thoughts: This was the only 8am film I managed to catch and I’m glad I made the effort. The performances were amazing which is to be expected – Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Peter Sarsgaard, Oliver Jackson-Cohen. With a cast like that it’d be pretty hard for this film to be terrible. It was maybe a little longer than it needed to be, but the story was engaging, and you wanted to keep watching to find out what happened in the past, and what would happen now.
Boiling Point
Synopsis: A restaurant during the busiest night of the year.
My Thoughts: Okay so Boiling Point was a lot to watch on a Monday morning – in a good way. It was actually one of the main reasons I decided to go to LFF. I went into this film completely blind, mainly anticipating Stephen Graham’s performance and was blown away by literally everything. I feel like I can’t say a lot about this film without spoiling it but let’s just say pretty much everything about this film was unexpected, especially the ending. Also, there’s a scene with Vinette Robinson which was just awkward and gratifying and uncomfortable and just…perfect.
Language Lessons
Synopsis: A man receives online Spanish lessons and develops a long-distance friendship with his tutor over zoom and phone calls.
My Thoughts: Shot via zoom and facetime, this film probably isn’t for everyone, but I found that I ended up really enjoying it. Before this, I’d seen a lot of very intense, long films so it was a nice entertaining break from that. It did what it set out to do – make you laugh and then get teary eyed in the very next scene.
There were a couple of films I saw that I felt deserved an honorary mention because they were really great and definitely worth keeping an eye out for.
Dashcam
Synopsis: At the start of the pandemic, an indulgent and self-deluded live-streaming improv musician abandon's L.A. for London, steals her ex-band mate's car, and makes the wrong decision to give a ride to an elderly woman who is not what she seems.
My Thoughts: I spent the entire film slouched in my seat, peeking through my fingers. If you think you have an idea of what this film is, I guarantee you’re wrong.
Ear for Eye
Synopsis: Adapted from a theatre production. British and American Black characters of different generations navigating their way through today's society.
My Thoughts: A true representation of the Black / Black British experience. It felt like visual poetry and the acting was top tier.
The Neutral Ground
Synopsis: A documentary about the removal of confederate statues in America. It delves into the history of white supremacy and looks for reasoning in the unreasonable.
My Thoughts: Created by a comedian, his humour definitely bled through and made this tough subject slightly easier to digest. A refreshing documentary about race in America.
Mass
Synopsis: Two families devastated by loss years after a school shooting, one whose son was the perpetrator and the other who was killed, meet.
My Thoughts: As awkward, unrelenting, emotional, and tense as you might expect a film like this to be. A+ acting from the cast. A great way to highlight issues with gun violence without the politics, instead focusing the conversation on the consequences which was really effective.