Where and when to see the best films from the BFI London Film Festival 2025
Feature by Colin Dibben
The high standard of films across the BFI London Film Festival 2025 is good news for cinema and streaming releases in the coming year.
Here are the most affecting films I saw, films that I would urge you to see too. I’ve added dates of cinema or streaming release, where known.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of a true story from January 2024 is emotionally overwhelming and anxiously claustrophobic.
The Ramallah based Red Crescent emergency service call centre receives a series of mobile phone calls from Hind Rajab. Hind is a scared 6-year-old Palestinian girl who is stuck in a car that has been shot up by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Hind is lying next to several dead relatives – in fact her older cousin makes the first phone call before being shot by an IDF tank.
The film is set in the call centre as a handful of workers, especially Rana (Saja Kilani) and Omar (Motaz Malhees) speak to Hind, whom we never see. Their manager Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) tries to coordinate safely sending an ambulance to rescue Hind. The process is complex: Mahdi at one point draws a diagram that looks like the ‘8 on its side’ symbol of infinity; and the process isn’t followed in good faith on the IDF side anyway.
Hind’s voice is represented using the actual audio files from the calls, the digital trace of which fills the whole screen. I would estimate from a sequence in which real social media footage from inside the centre is used in the foreground while the actors replicate events in the background, that the level of fictional dramatisation here is low.
How many films can you name that are both tense thrillers and completely heartbreaking? ‘Heartbreaking’ is a cliché but I was sobbing intermittently and so were plenty of others in the cinema.
There’s a trauma counsellor character, Nisreen (Clara Khoury) who tells the call centre workers speaking to little Hind – and breaking down at their own powerlessness and the impossibility of the task – to ‘take deep breaths and sip water’. When I looked around the cinema, there were plenty of people like me taking her advice in an attempt to stay calm.
Traumatic stuff to watch, but the film is a perfect allegory for all of us watching as the genocide in Gaza unfolds.
The Voice of Hind Rajab will be released by Altitude Distribution in UK and Eire cinemas on 16 January 2026. Watch out for special screenings before then.
The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s character-driven thriller set in 1970s Brazil is an energetic and melancholic homage to bright, colourful ‘film on film’ and Brazilian music and cinema from that era.
It is also a cracking sultry tale of resistance to often flamboyant political corruption.
Marcelo (Wagner Moura) is an industrial researcher on the run from a powerful businessman. He returns to his hometown of Recife and finds sanctuary in a small community of refugees run by an idiosyncratic older woman.
Marcelo takes a job in a local government archive while trying to arrange safe passage out of the country for him and his young son. But Brazil has become a violent place, especially for those who oppose the government and its powerful supporters.
It’s a great turn from Moura, who won the best actor prize at this year’s Cannes film festival. He exudes a kind of calm fatalism that is totally beguiling.
Elsewhere, the film energetically zips off into the different perspectives of minor characters, such as the hitmen tasked with taking out Marcelo and a journalism student in the 2020s who tracks down Marcelo’s grown-up son.
All the acting is good, with even minor characters given screen time and dialogue to show their qualities. Even though the film exudes the kind of steamy languour that facilitates luxuriating in slow reveals of character, there are some superb action sequences, as well as intriguing story jumps.
The Secret Agent will be released by Mubi in UK and Eire cinemas on 20 February 2026.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Prepare to be dazzled, beautifully. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani always mess with your head in fantastic, frenetic pop art and pop culture ways.
Their latest film is their wildest so far, homaging 60s and 70s spy capers and Diabolik style comics and using vivid primary colours and rapid editing in amazing ways.
Then there’s the story: the crazed editing makes it look and feel like the plot has been cut up, thrown around and fallen back onto the screen in random fashion. But a tale emerges.
A retired spy John (Fabio Testi) is sipping his drink on a beach in southern France when a topless sunbather with a diamond nipple stud triggers memories of the case that ruined his career.
As a younger man (Yanick Rennier), John hunted down his masked arch-nemesis Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), a woman with many faces, many names and many killer, kickass moves.
After the sunbathing woman turns up dead, older John finds out that an older Serpentik (Maria de Medeiros) is back to settle old scores.
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are a bit Marmite: quite a few people walked out of the screening I went to. I love what they do, it makes me squirm with sensory overload, but then I love the sorts of films that they are referencing. The crazed, cut-up aspect feels like new life breathed into those brilliant older films, but also like a reduction to their scintillating essence.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond will be streaming soon in the UK on Shudder. Badger Shudder to try and get this on the big screen!
Human Resource
Thai writer-director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit has crafted a beautiful, quiet, reflective film around the face of his star, Prapamonton Eiamchan.
She plays Fran, who works in HR for a services company in Bangkok. When she finds out she is pregnant, Fran starts to re-consider her career and her life, her appetite for risk and conflict with boyfriend, co-workers and ‘swinging dick’ boss.
I was really struck by Prapamonton Eiamchan’s quiet performance. She doesn’t say much but the camera spends a lot of time showing her face in profile, in real time, and the effect is rather magical.
This is a film about young urban professionals in Thailand. Despite the privilege that suggests, there is something universal about the experience of Fran’s time world, the way Eiamchan is and acts in the unfolding time of the film.
Human Resource currently has no UK distributor but at least two of Thamrongrattanarit’s previous films are available on Mubi so hopefully they will pick this up too.
Kontinental ‘25
Cluj, Transylvania, 2025: teacher turned bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) helps evict a homeless man from a cellar. When he commits suicide, guilt-ridden and garrulous Orsolya tries to come to terms with what has happened through a series of largely verbal encounters, with her husband, an ex-colleague, an ex-student and her priest.
Radu Jude’s dry, satirical touch is in evidence – the film is packed with witty, thought-provoking dialogue and there are sideswipes at prejudice and hypocrisy of many kinds.
But there is also something very human and realistic about Orsolya’s quest for redemption.
Kontinental ‘25 is out in selected UK cinemas from 31 October 2025
The Stranger
François Ozon, the accomplished and prolific French director, has done a good job of filming Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, aka The Outsider in the popular English translation. The book is the thinking person’s The Catcher in the Rye, but was badly adapted by Luchino Visconti in 1967.
Ozon’s version is a film of beautiful, harsh monochrome sensuality, with hotty Benjamin Voisin playing affectless Meursault, the anti-hero who kills “an Arab” on a beach in Algiers for no reason at all, or at least not one he wants to build into a mitigating circumstance for a court of law.
Ozon comes to terms with the casual racism of the book with a travelogue style introduction that highlights by utter omission the violence of 1930s French-colonised Algeria. Here, too, the victim has a name and a sister, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit).
I thought the film captured the harsh sensuality of the novel while keeping the mystery of the main character. It is a long film and slightly laboured. Like the book, the film leaves questions of agency and consistency of philosophy in its wake.
This is exactly how I imagined the book should look on film.
The Stranger will be released in UK and Eire cinemas by Curzon in Spring 2026.
A Useful Ghost
I am a fan of films that ‘sprawl’ aesthetically and conceptually, zipping off in strange new directions.
The debut from Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke is a very odd, very good example.
A bookish young chap known only as Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan) buys a new vacuum cleaner, only to find that it is haunted: it coughs and chokes at night.
A repairman turns up and tells him the story behind the haunting: a worker died in the vacuum cleaner factory and is seeking revenge. But, the repairman reveals, there is a larger story behind this one.
Soon we are deep into a Thai government conspiracy to neutralise the ghosts of those murdered during the 2010 pro-democracy protests.
Ghost story, comedy, activist satire, ode to memory and grief, monument to fallen comrades – it is all here and then some. The film looks great, especially the factory scenes, and the special effects are surprisingly realistic too.
A Useful Ghost took home the top prize in this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week.
