London Film Festival 2025 Report

A fish rots from the head. No surprise, then, given the lack of integrity shown by a series of UK governments, that the 2025 London Film Festival should have felt like a putrid and gelatinous mess:  a distilled enactment of where we stand as British filmmakers and movie lovers. On entering the Picturehouse Central for press screenings, I was (accordingly) assaulted by a whiff of stale urine, a stench that fitted the seedy vacillations of this year’s festival outlook.  

Oozing the best of intentions, genuine warmth and woolly thinking, the festival felt like a colossal squid. Good intentions alone will not give a cultural organisation a spine, or transform a gargantuan mollusc into a vertebrate. This year’s festival was also haunted by the ghosts of capitalist realism. Bureaucratic decision-making has enthralled the seventh art. I’m talking about our capacity in Britain to frame a meaningful and progressive conversation about the state of cinema and visual dramatic narratives, away from platitudes, handwringing or false congratulation. Mark Fisher’s words about the Slow Cancellation of the Future feel achingly apposite: “Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new.”¹  

The 2025 LFF programme gave us a rash of inoffensive and vaguely categorising “strands”. Some of them read as imperatives (Love! Laugh! Thrill! Journey! Create! Dare!), others as loose labels (Experimenta – not very experimental – Shorts and Cult, or that most clunky of all, Family). These strands were organised along the principle of the telephone directory, but without relying on anything as ordinary – or easy to comprehend – as an alphabet. And within this bag of “strands” the festival showcased a range of work that seemed to scratch an itch or tick a box. At best, you could call it eclectic (though I admit this is true of the generalist film festivals the world over).  

I concede that it is genuinely difficult to keep up with the forces blowing our industry hither and thither, like tumbleweed on a studio lot. Looking at the UK ecosystem alone, curators are navigating rapid technological change; the unprecedented integration of film production and distribution; the failure of UK governments to protect our indigenous film industry and artists through properly regulated and carefully designed incentives or levies on streamers; and a concerted attack on the public service broadcasters, who alongside the BFI form the core of public funding for UK film.  

Programmers operate in an environment where our public conversation (partly thanks to a vacuum of robust and ethical cultural leadership) has collapsed into thinly veiled name-calling and vapid (self)censorship. It is hard to process the sheer decadence, barbarity and censoriousness of our particular historical moment. How do you programme films in a way that’s both bureaucratically acceptable (read: won’t offend anyone) and intellectually or ethically truthful? This kind of cerebral and moral balancing act is precisely what our cultural “leaders” (festival programmers and the heads of our arm’s-length bodies like the Arts Council and BFI) should be capable of – nay, would be capable of if they weren’t so enthralled by neoliberal orthodoxy and shallow buzzwords that save everyone the hard work of sitting with uncomfortable feelings and the sins of our fathers. And so we have the disorientated cocktail of denialism and thought paralysis that was the 2025 London Film Festival.

At some point, sitting through the festival’s corny trailer in NFT 3, I found myself wishing that they had just blacked out the screen and cut off the sound. This would have been easier to stomach than the breathless and fluffy “most-dramatic-romantic-moments-of-this-year’s-offering” spliced together. The edit matched movement and eye-line, in a desperate style we have come to expect, accompanied by an equally predictable, poppy and anodyne tune by independent music phenomenon ionnalee, “Still Blue”. Indeed, I too am still blue. Because I wanted some cultural and thought leadership here.  

There was also the decidedly weird experience of being on a train to London to catch a screening of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, receiving a last-minute email telling you that it had been cancelled, and realising that it was October 7th. Surely that wasn’t the reason? When I prodded, I was told that Curzon wanted to keep the press screening closer to the release date. Did that allay everyone’s paranoid fantasy about our censorious moment in time?  

The BFI is trying to throw a party while the house is on fire.  

Techno-authoritarian surveillance capitalism buys up our media and storytelling platforms as if they were balls in a game of PacMan. Lies and genocide. War dressed up as peace. Exchanging our freedoms for ease and watching the last twenty-two (plus) years of cynical murder has done something to western cultural elites and their capacity to comprehend the responsibilities of  storytellers.  

It isn’t good enough to let your choice of songs (great: a female musician represented by her own independent label) and some of the films you select (many of them “right on” choices) speak for you in a flabbily framed programme that you hope will ventriloquise a set of principles on your behalf. Some of the festival titles are testaments to the suffering and injustices of our times. Others are symptoms or engines of it. But did the programmers shape their offerings in a meaningful way? No. In a gesture of near-surrender, they left any kind of critical, artistic and intellectual scaffolding to the audience.  

The programmers’ malaise is perfectly encapsulated in films I was amazed even made the cut and others that were overlooked. I shudder to think that an actual programmer sat through one particular film and thought it was anything but an actualisation of the eponymous mess of its title. Maybe it was selected because the first ten minutes constitute a lesson in how a long take can’t fix the want of story and performance? I sometimes wonder if male-identifying directors have misconstrued the long take because of the easy metaphorical linkage with other kinds of stamina or holding power. More imaginative curation would have included Jason Soo’s remarkable documentary Al Awda (2024), adding a nuanced look at questions of solidarity which are as pressing as ever in the context of Palestine. 

Brilliant and timely movies like Kaouther Ben Hania’s Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab, 2025), Palestine 36, Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza and Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 were cheek by jowl with programme fillers and the jaded hauntings of ageing “auteurs”, from Baumbach to Sorrentino. Artists don’t need to get their politics “right,” but has anyone stopped to think why “great” directors seem to get more stymied when they are working for Netflix Studios? Vertical integration isn’t good for anyone’s clarity of thought. It is no surprise that many directors working within the contemporary film industry should be creating garbled utterances. I know from my own experience of developing feature films that clarity of thought and intellectual conviction are viewed with profound suspicion by the “money.” If only more great auteurs could follow Celine Sciamma’s example of integrity and restraint (qualities on show in all her work and discourse around it), and just say no to making feature films for a while. Take a pause and teach?

La Grazia

Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film is a case in point. La Grazia wants to handle the themes of mercy and justice by telling the story of a fictional Italian president (played by the ever-watchable Tony Servillo) tackling the conundrum of whether or not to sign a euthanasia bill on the eve of his retirement. During his last days in office, Servillo’s character also agonises over the identity of his late wife’s lover, whether to put down his sick horse, and where to bestow his presidential pardon. His closest counsellors are his daughter and his best friend from high school. The sentimentalisation of these nepotistic relationships might be realistic in this day and age (see Jared Kushner), yet should we resign ourselves to this creepy and undemocratic vibe? But why am I getting so worked up? In Sorrentino’s world, it looks like democracy was overrated all along: We have good tailoring, real Italian hip hop and an African pope who rides a Vespa… So, we’re cool.  

La Grazia wants to think about serious issues and has the air of offering a sort of Utopian alternative to the current dispensation. But this is a film that ends with what I can only understand to be a sentimental nod to a robot police dog. Said police dog – along with a host of handsome, dutiful and again sentimentalised plain-clothed Corazzieri (an elite regiment of presidential bodyguards dating back to the late 16th century) – oversees the retirement of Servillo’s president, who also receives an affectionate standing ovation at La Scala in Milan. Are we really getting all misty-eyed about the “decency” of men in grey and robotic policing?  

There are moments of style and flashes of clever insight in La Grazia, but this can’t cover up the film’s confused ethics. This is a huge problem for a film with such serious themes at its heart.  Sorrentino doesn’t have the wisdom to give us a lasting consideration of the characters or themes that his film so tantalisingly courts. As a result, I even mistrust his moving nostalgia for the Bravi Alpini, and his use of the Carozzieri’s regimental tagline (“Virtus in periculis firmior” which roughly translates to virtue increases with danger). Although both regiments had roles in a strand of Italian anti-fascist history, Sorrentino’s use of them doesn’t align with his tale or characters. They go against the grain of a story that celebrates nothing much more than elegance and a failure to give up bad habits (whether smoking or jealousy). There is something deeply troubling in the elitism and political insouciance championed here. All I discern is a vision vitiated by excessive conversation with film executives, who have no understanding of politics, and the neo-fascist police state that Italy has evolved into under Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni. History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes – and in this context, Sorrentino has his reasons wrong.  

Bugonia

Bugonia is another example of the malaise among leading auteurs. I haven’t seen the Korean original upon which Lanthimos’ film is based, Jang Joon-hwan’s Jigureul jikyeora! (Save the Green Planet!, 2003), so my comments will not draw on it. (Spoilers ahead) Surely at some point in development someone should have told screenwriter Will Tracy and Lanthimos that the chemical castration which the two kidnappers undergo during the first act is problematic, at best a cheap trick. It sidesteps the sexual violence that most women know lies alongside the urge to entrap and contain them. Is this an honest plot strategy in a world where we know the story of Elizabeth Fritzl and the countless women raped and tortured during war time? As if this isn’t bad enough gender politics, you then end the film on the assertion that the character you have just tortured and dismembered is an alien godhead-puppeteer. This takes misogynistic fantasies of female omnipotence to the next level: we’ve just spent two hours dismembering and torturing Emma Stone, but never mind, she was in charge all along.  

Despair around masculinity also ran through Hlynur Pálmason’s Ástin sem eftir er (The Love that Remains, 2025) but with much greater depth and poetic originality. The film’s last image, of a man at sea, can be read in so many ways, but perhaps most despairingly as the death of the family man. This quietly assured film and its grounded performances, its dark sense of justice, irony and humour, were deeply compelling. In spite of nods to the great Norse and Icelandic Sagas, and touches of magical realism (or wish fulfilment?), Hlynur Pálmason’s unostentatious yet bold film feels more deeply rooted in the world and other people – as we find it, and as we find them – than a lot else on offer at the festival. These qualities, along with the film’s quietly resolute emotional presence, are what remain after viewing. There’s no hiding from uncomfortable feelings in these frames.  

Uncomfortable feelings are evoked in Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, which has come hot and fast off the heels of his excellent film about Ernest Cole – Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024). Orwell: 2+2=5 is a sobering and affectionate account of George Orwell’s life and fatal illness. It is also a deep and thoughtful encounter with the author’s most compelling and urgent ideas and their relevance today. Peck not only appreciates Orwell and his values; he makes it all too clear why the late writer should matter to us now. This is bold filmmaking led by ideas and untrammelled by surface, but thoroughly engaged with it. It should be obligatory viewing in all secondary schools.  

Palestine 36

The most memorable and important films I saw at the festival were from and about Palestine. Of these, the most magisterial was Palestine 36, in which Annemarie Jacir unpacks the history of  today’s conflict – and the British role in creating it – through intersecting stories that take us from city to village. Masterfully, Jacir weaves and connects different perspectives that help us to understand in human terms how this treacherous history played out, turning her camera on dockworker Khalid (Saleh Bakri), Oxford-educated female journalist Khouloud (Yasmin Al Massri), her disappointing apparatchik husband, their appropriately named young protege Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), and the people of his village. Jacir is also interested in the colonialist characters who shaped the fate of the Holy Land, their zealotry and blindnesses as well as their good intentions. Like any good storyteller, she doesn’t flatten her story into black and white. This is a film that must be seen. Everything is working to Jacir’s ends here, and in spite of huge production obstacles, performances and costumes come together to create a powerful if devastating testament to almost a century of struggle and injustice. Palestine 36 is greatly enhanced by Jacir’s poignant and well-judged use of archival footage – an eloquent, crucial testament to the veracity of the director’s (his)story and its urgency. There’s something deep and radical in the act of showing the people she’s advocating for and their continued existence not only through fiction but through lovingly curated archive, too.  

A different kind of archive comes to play for the accomplished filmmaker Kamal Aljafari in With Hasan in Gaza. The chronicle of a road trip across the Strip cut together from his own mini DV footage dating from 2001, Aljafari’s latest doesn’t exactly promise pure cinema, but that is just what the director creates here. From the first image of a roadblock to the understated but cumulatively heartbreaking peregrinations shuttling us from the beach into bombarded kitchens and dusty alleyways across the Strip, Aljafari has galvanised every bit of cinema’s poetry to lament and testify to Gaza.  

The Voice of Hind Rajab

Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab blends documentary and dramatic reconstruction to create this year’s most urgent and upsetting film: a chronicle of the last few hours in the life of the titular six-year-old Palestinian child, brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers – together with the rest of her family and the ambulance workers dispatched to rescue her – in January 2024 in Gaza. For that, Ben Hania uses the actual 70-minute recording of the girl’s desperate calls to the Red Crescent offices in Ramallah, and the film reenacts her pleas with the workers who sought to arrange her rescue. While there are questions around consent and privacy – even or perhaps especially for a murdered child – Ben Hania’s work is fuelled by such outrage at what happened to Hind it makes for incendiary, necessary viewing. It feels obscene that programmers thought it was okay to list and show this film alongside everything else – as if the deliberate murder of a small girl, her family, and the medical staff sent to rescue her, was business as usual. As if that weren’t enough to stop all the clocks and stop the dog from barking on a juicy bone. No, the show must go on, and the programmers did not even see fit to print a black page in memory of Hind Rajab, or the 64,000 other dead children of Gaza1 – or if that feels too risqué, to give space to a fundraiser for a charity like War Child or UNICEF.  

There are festivals that have taken a stand and have a spine. Integrity doesn’t compromise artistic excellence. Believing in something might even help arts organisations be more compelling to their audiences. Faith in something deeper than money is art’s ultimate blazon. Intellectual rigour should be the bottom line for any film curator, and the lack of a stated ethical position poisoned this year’s festival.  

Other festivals manage. It is notable that The Cambridge Film Festival has committed to programming films with a strict 50:50 male/female ratio of directors. They also programmed this year’s festival without a single MUBI title (MUBI has been boycotted by a range of festivals and filmmakers after it was revealed that it has received one hundred million dollars from Sequoia). Instead, the London Film Festival chose not to hurt anyone’s feelings by refusing to take an overt stand on anything, not even issuing any kind of statement about the use of generative AI. Instead, in the time-honoured fashion of British functionaries presiding over a disaster (see Palestine 36), they sat on the fence.  

BFI London Film Festival
8 – 19 October 2025
https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/

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