BFI London Film Festival 2024 at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
The BFI London Film Festival returns to HOME for 2024, as audiences get a chance to dive into some of the best films of the festival right here in Manchester. LFF perhaps the most prestigious film festival in the country, and for a number of years now they’ve been bringing a raft of brand new films to audiences across the UK. For 2024, there are eight titles from some of the world’s biggest filmmakers to discover from 9 – 21 October.
Screenings start with the latest from acclaimed British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) who takes us to WWII-era London with Saoirse Ronan in Opening Night film, Blitz (Wed 9 Oct). Ronan stars as an East End mum who makes the tough decision to send her young son George (Elliott Heffernan) to the countryside to escape German bombing, only for the young boy to alight his train, determined to stay home in the capital. With a cast that includes Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke, plus a score by Hans Zimmer, this is sure to be one of the hot tickets of the festival.
There is more Hollywood stardust spread across 2024’s London Film Festival too. Marielle Heller’s new feminist fable Nightbitch (Thu 17 Oct) stars Amy Adams as a mother who puts her career on hold to parent her young toddler. While director Jesse Eisenberg also appears on-screen opposite Succession‘s Kieran Culkin as half of a familial odd-couple travelling to Poland to pay their respects to their Jewish grandmother in A Real Pain (Fri 18 Oct).
Other highlights of the line-up include Sean Baker’s Anora, which took the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The widely acclaimed film from the director of Tangerine and The Florida Project features Mikey Madison as Ani, a sex worker offered a wild, glamourous life by the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch. Anora is billed as a “freewheeling, rambunctious adventure” that constantly plays with audience expectations of both its genre and characters,
British director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey) is back with another coming of age film in Bird (Sun 20 Oct). This time she’s harnessing the talents of Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski and Nykiya Adams for a shapeshifting story of that follows a family’s tangled lives on the margins, that sees the filmmaker dip into the realm of not just social, but magical realism for the first time.
The closing night film is something of a change of pace, as Oscar winner Morgan Neville navigates the life and work of musician Pharrell Williams through the medium of LEGO in Piece by Piece (Mon 21 Oct). This blocky documentary pieces together Williams’ journey from a teenage wannabe, through his work in the band N.E.R.D., to his solo releases and collaborations with such luminaries as Kendrick Lamar and Daft Punk. If you’ve ever wanted to see the likes of Jay-Z, Missy Elliot, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dogg rendered in Danish plastic, this is the film for you.
