BFI London Film Festival Director Kristy Matheson talks to Curzon about the year-long marathon it takes to bring the expansive programme together.
CURZON: How does the programme start to take shape?
KRISTY MATHESON: When we finish an edition of the LFF, a number of the team will immediately jump onto [the March LGBTQIA+ festival] BFI Flare. For the team that remains solely with the LFF, we’ll start again in earnest in January. Over the subsequent months, we’ll have seen a lot of works-in-progress and done quite a lot of research. But once the new year arrives, we have the winter festivals and that’s when we start viewing properly again, finding the films that we really love and feel perfect for London. Then, with spring, there’s a whole other clutch of festivals, including Cannes. When summer arrives, there’s sadly no beach holiday for us. We do a lot more viewing and start making the final decisions.
The Room Next Door (2024)
As the programme starts to take shape, allowing us to see the bigger picture and get a sense of all the different choices that could be made, the team looks at how we balance the programme. It has to have enough in it that feels ‘known’, so that people don’t feel completely at sea and think ‘I don’t know where to start – I haven’t heard of any of it’. That isn’t a pleasurable experience for any audience member. So, we want to have anchor points in the festival, where people recognise filmmakers or actors. But we also want things that can wrap around that – the films that are completely unknown that allow audiences to take a chance. It’s exciting to take a wild roll of the dice and see what happens when you come out of the other side of a film like that.
There’s also the geographic balance. Some festivals might not have the opportunity to be so adventurous, but we’re really lucky because we have an audience in London that ‘knows their cinema’ and wants to watch films from every corner of the globe that feature every walk of life. Our role is to ensure that we achieve that balance – a great spread of films to show what’s happened earlier in the year and offer up a crystal ball that will take us into the cinema arriving between now and the first part of next year. All the films don’t necessarily speak to each other, but if you dig through them, say watch five or six films, you might begin to see patterns emerge.
A Real Pain (2024)
Festivals also offer the chance to watch a film that might otherwise never see the light of a projector.
KM: There’s something very special about that. Some of my favourite memories are the films that I only ever saw once at a festival. That moment – remembering who I was with, or if I was by myself; the conversation I might have had with a random stranger I was sitting next to; the theatre I was watching the film in – becomes indelible. And with festivals that play as the year becomes cooler, when you pull out your winter coat, you sometimes find a ticket stub from the film you saw the previous year. It just accentuates the singular moment of a festival experience.
Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)
In your introduction to the published programme, you talk about the city as a theme of the festival.
KM: Yes. It’s looking at the programme as a reflector for the city. London is a global city, the whole world lives here. It has a unique identity. But what makes it really fascinating is that it’s a city of many different villages – each having a very distinct identity, with their passions and interests. It was great to think of the programme as something that’s spacious and sprawling: a landscape that reflects the city it unfurls upon. It has all these details, moments and tiny geographies. I’m hoping that this reflective quality allows people to see themselves in the programme, but also for them to have the ability to turn a corner and discover something completely new. Just like navigating London, you’re in one place and then, a few streets away, you’re in a completely different world. When you’re looking to create a programme, you want it to have a sense of coherence, but you also want it to be full of surprises and differences.
We Live in Time (2024)
While attending festivals and working on this programme, have any trends emerged?
KM: Animation. It’s a massively strong year for it, spanning different age groups, tastes and forms. Just look at the films we have in the programme. There’s Flow (Journey strand), an incredible animation from Latvia that premiered at Cannes. It’s crafted in Blender, which is often used for video games, giving it a really unique look. But outside how it’s made, the film is a wild, almost transcendental experience – it’s really remarkable. Then there’s Memoir of a Snail (Official Competition), which is this beautiful, hand-crafted Claymation film. It’s funny and dark – certainly not for children – but [Mary and Max director] Adam Elliot has made another film that manages to touch your soul really deeply, rip it apart and yet make you feel like you’ve been in a warm hug. Then there’s The Wild Robot [Special Presentation], Last Christmas [Family Gala] and, of course, our fabulous closing night film, Piece by Piece, which are all really sophisticated 3D animations. The Dominican Republic has also produced a great film with Olivia and the Clouds (First Feature Competition). So, you can see that animation has been really exciting this year.
The Wild Robot (2024)
Piece by Piece, The Wild Robot and That Christmas are part of a programme of films that will also screen at venues around the country, giving audiences outside London a taste of the festival.
KM: What’s fantastic about this is that films land differently in different places. What excites audiences in Glasgow might be different to the reaction to a film in Sheffield. But it’s also great that we get to share some of the programme more widely around the country. But even here in London, each of the venues has their own personality. I’ve met people whose festival experience is defined by the venue they love as much as the films they want to see. That’s another layer to this notion of the festival as a city.
EXPLORE THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMME
