London Film School Hires New CEO

Ellise Shafer Daniel Kaluuya world premiered his feature directorial debut, “The Kitchen,” at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday night, calling it “one of the best days of my life.” Kaluuya was on hand alongside his co-director Kibwe Tavares, producer Daniel Emmerson and several of the film’s actors, including “Top Boy” star Kane Robinson and newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman. Set in a dystopian London where all social housing has been banned, the film follows the residents of a community called the Kitchen who must fight to save their home. Speaking before the premiere, Kaluuya and Tavares explained that it’s taken nearly a decade to bring the Netflix film to the screen.

Ellise Shafer Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” was named the best film in the official competition at this year’s BFI London Film Festival Awards. “Paradise Is Burning” by Mika Gustafson received the Sutherland Award in the first feature competition, while Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias” took home the Grierson Award in the documentary competition and “The Archive: Queer Nigerians” directed by Simisolaoluwa Akande won the short film competition. The jury presidents for this year’s awards included Amat Escalante (official competition), Raine Allen-Miller (first feature competition), Rubika Shah (documentary competition) and Charlotte Regan (short film competition).

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi has clinched the best film award in the main official competition of the 67th London Film Festival with his latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist. 

EXCLUSIVE: The BFI London Film Festival closes Sunday with the world premiere of The Kitchen, a movie set in a dystopian London where an impoverished community is forced to fend for themselves in ramshackle apartment blocks. It marks the feature directorial debut of Oscar- winning actor Daniel Kaluuya and architect-turned-filmmaker Kibwe Tavares.

Kit Connor is enjoying a movie screening in London!

By any metric, 23 years is a long time to wait for a sequel to Chicken Run, even when you factor in the fiendishly slow gestation of Aardman Animations’ meticulous stop-motion process. Surprisingly, it still feels fresh, not just because of the spring-clean of the core voice cast — Mel Gibson being the highest-profile casualty, lopped off as the “lone free-ranger” Rocky — but because, in the hands of director Sam Fell and his writing team, Dawn of The Nugget delivers a cleverly modern kind of family entertainment that, while it works to a formula, never feels written by committee.

Todd Haynes tells me that May December, his gripping melodrama starring Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, “aggressively disturbs our moral moorings.”

Pop-up soundstage specialist Volume Global has teamed with White Owl Film Studios, an Indigenous-owned multimedia company representing Canada‘s First Nation community, on a new production facility in Wahnapitae First Nation territory.

EXCLUSIVE: The London Film School (LFS) has been hit with a new round of senior managerial exits. 

It’s not every day that a filmmaker will rise up during an interview and recite Old Testament tales and sing out their favorite hymn. Well, hallelujah, brother Jeymes Samuel for spreading the gospel’s good news.

Cailee Spaeny dazzles while promoting her new film Priscilla at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on Monday (October 9).

Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.  

The first week of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London Film Festival wrapped this evening with a rapturous onstage Q&A session with writer-director Greta Gerwig.

Naman Ramachandran India’s Crawling Angel Films and Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia are teaming on Busan Asian Film School (AFiS) alumnus Aakash Chhabra’s feature directorial debut “I′ll Smile in September.” The film is selected at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Project Market. Akanga’s credits include Cannes winner “Tiger Stripes,” Locarno winner “A Land Imagined” and its “Oasis of Now” is in competition in the festival’s New Currents strand.

Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall irrupted into a flurry of cheers this afternoon as filmmaker Martin Scorsese strolled on stage to take part in a career Q&A at the London Film Festival. 

Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation, confirmed this afternoon that work has quietly begun on a third edition in the company’s Frozen film franchise during a keynote session at the London Film Festival (LFF). 

“Theatres and streamers need to coexist,” Bill Kramer, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, concluded during a keynote this morning in London when quizzed on his opinions about the future of cinema.   

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell says that “if you’re prodding at something uncomfortable, that’s what movies are for.”

It took eight years for David Cronenberg to return after 2014’s “Maps to the Stars.” But when he did, with last year’s “Crimes of the Future,” people welcomed him back with open arms. Critics and fans rejoiced in seeing one of the more unique and creative filmmakers returning to directing.

Marta Balaga It’s time to get excited for David Cronenberg’s upcoming “The Shrouds,” at least according to Diane Kruger. “We just finished filming it. I think it might be his most personal film, because it talks about him and the passing of his wife.” Kruger, starring alongside Vincent Cassel – cast as Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, who builds a device to connect with the dead – confirmed she will play multiple roles in the thriller.