Weird and wonderful at the London Film Festival 2024
Preview feature by Colin Dibben
The London Film Festival 2024 runs from 9 to 20 October.
Outside of the big names and big films, there are some great looking, less celebrated films on offer at London Film Festival 2024, including:
• Pepe
Dominican director Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias explores the possibilities of animal consciousness in this hallucinatory story, told by the ghost of one of Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar’s pet hippos. This is a very strange journey indeed, travelling via notions of experience, exile, captivity and alienation to end up – who knows where. Wildly inventive and playful.
• Manji
Bored housewife Sonoko embarks on an affair with a younger woman, only to become tangled in a psychosexual web of power games, blood oaths and suicide pacts. No-one did angsty, modernist melodrama with a sexploitation twist like Japanese film makers in the 1960s. This is a prime example by one of the best, Yasuzo Masumura. Beautifully restored and with widescreen wow factor, this is a classic of obsessive desire that balances its sensual assault with surprising subtlety.
• Architecton
An epic and poetic work that meditates on humanity’s relationship with architecture. Victor Kossakovsky captures astonishing images, from the ancient temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon to the recent seismic destruction of cities in Turkey, to reflect on the rise and fall of civilisations. Both ravishingly cinematic and imbued with a sense of environmental urgency, this is a BFI release so hopefully will not disappear down the k-hole of film festival so-called “oddities”.
• Stranger Eyes
In this psychological thriller, a young couple’s baby daughter disappears. Then they receive DVDs containing surreptitious footage of themselves. The couple set about combing through images to find clues about the kidnapper. Mixing perfectly composed architectural shots with static CCTV video recordings, Yeo Siew Hua’s quietly spooky film articulates what different ways of seeing reveal about our hidden values. It also deftly satirises the narcissistic basis of contemporary life.
• Look Into My Eyes
Filmmaker Lana Wilson enters the worlds of seven New York City psychics, recording intimate sessions with their clients. Most films about psychics ask questions like: Are they frauds? How do they do that? This intriguing and thought-provoking documentary offers something different: an immersion in several intense, transactional relationships. This is an engrossing and moving look at the complexity and necessity of human connections.
• Abiding Nowhere
Taiwanese slow cinema master Tsai Ming-liang returns with another in his series of films about walking. This time, a man dressed in a red robe relives the 17-year pilgrimage of Xuanzang, the 7th century Buddhist monk. It’s a truly meditative film that tests and reaffirms the power of attention (remember what Apichatpong Weerasethakul said: dozing off is a positive if liminal state of perception too!) and silence while moving toward a transcendent experience of time.
• Soundtrack to a Coup D’état
Set during the final months of Patrice Lumumba’s life, Johan Grimonprez’s film forensically investigates the incendiary politics of the nascent Democratic Republic of Congo in 1960. In doing so, the filmmaker draws fascinating connections between post-war jazz, US imperialism and the Pan-African decolonisation movement. Jazzy beats and syncopation make the perfect accompaniment to this uncovering of disturbing truths about the decolonial struggle during the Cold War.
• Black Box Diaries
Japanese journalist Shiori Itō’s self-documented journey to seek justice against the man who sexually assaulted her is brave and empowering. Itô was a trainee journalist when she was drugged and raped by a powerful political journalist. Failed by the police and an archaic judiciary, she decides to undertake her own investigation. Based on her bestselling journal, and the video diary that chronicled her gruelling battle for justice, this is a powerful and unique document that breaks the taboo over rape in Japan.
• 2073
Director Asif Kapadia draws on science fiction to examine questions surrounding human species extinction. The story is set in a near future totalitarian world. Kapadia’s approach is inspired by both Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, making this an unsettling blend of fiction and documentary. It is unsettling in both a formal sense and due to the disturbing conclusions the film moves towards.
• Chain Reactions
Alexandre O. Philippe celebrates the 50th anniversary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with an exploration of the film through the eyes of filmmakers, writers and fans. Lots of tense and grisly clips accompany chats with the likes of author Stephen King, filmmakers Karyn Kusama and Takashi Miike, critic Alexandra Heller Nicholas and actor-comedian Patton Oswalt. Bags of fun, with the bags sewn from human skin!
Tickets are from £10 and £5 if you are lucky enough to be 25 and under.
