Leeds International Film Festival 2024

Back for its 38th edition this November is Leeds International Film Festival, which returns with a 17-day programme packed with premieres and previews of films from some of the world’s foremost filmmakers, alongside exciting new voices, and a few curated dips into classic cinema history.

Freshly-branded for 2024 is Constellation, the new name for the huge main programme featuring some of the most talked about movies of the year, as well as UK premieres included in the feature film competition. Constellation is where you can find Kieran Culkin opposite director Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain, Amy Adams as a ferocious mother in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, and Sean Baker’s hotly-anticipated Anora. It’s also home to some of Britain’s most celebrated filmmakers, including Andrea Arnold with her latest film Bird starring Barry Keogan, and legend Mike Leigh, who features with his new film Hard Truths.

Fans of non-fiction will want to check out Cinema Versa, Leeds International Film Festival’s dedicated documentary section. Highlights this year include It Was All a Dream, a feminist music journalist’s inside look at early hip hop, and Trans Memoria in which Swedish artist Victoria Verseau diarises her experiences with gender affirming surgery in Thailand. We’re also looking forward to seeing what Alex Ross Perry does with his boundary-pushing music doc Pavements, while Grand Theft Hamlet sees two out of work actors stage a version of Hamlet entirely inside of the video game Grand Theft Auto.

If your tastes lean more towards genre cinema, then Fanomenon is the strand for you.

If your tastes lean more towards genre cinema, then Fanomenon is the strand for you. Filled with fantasy, sci-fi, horror and cult cinema, this is the spot for Thibault Emin’s psychedelic body-horror Else, the Hemingway-inspired South Korean crime anthology The Killers, and American maverick Joel Potrykus’ darkly comic Vulcanizadora. It’s also home to dedicated Sci-Fi and horror marathons, plus The Weird of Oz, a glorious selection of eight Aussie cult classics featuring everything from Mad Max 2, to truck-based thriller Roadgames to giant boar horror Razorback. 

There’s much more too. LFF Shorts features a dizzying array of short films to suit any interest, from music video competitions, to queer compilations and locally-sourced work. While for 2024, there is a retrospective celebrating the world of actress Smita Patil which promises a study of the politics of feminism and the art of screen acting, as well as Leeds artist-filmmaker Stuart Croft. Croft passed in 2015, but leaves behind a body of work that subverts and upends genre and narrative expectations. To spotlight his practice, the festival has paired his films with titles from filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Pierre Melville and Stanley Donen.