{"id":480543,"date":"2025-10-07T14:04:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/480543\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T14:04:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:04:11","slug":"london-film-festival-boss-on-premieres-protests-and-tilly-norwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/480543\/","title":{"rendered":"London Film Festival Boss on Premieres, Protests and Tilly Norwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival<\/a> \u2014\u00a0the biggest film event in the U.K. \u2014 kicks off on Oct. 8. <\/p>\n

\n\tLaunching with the European premiere of Rian Johnson\u2019s \u201cWake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,\u201d the lineup of around 250 films, like most years, is awash with big hitters from across 2025\u2019s other major festivals. Jim Jarmusch\u2019s Venice-winner \u201cFather Mother Sister Brother\u201d is there, as is Jafar Panahi\u2019s Cannes winning \u201cIt Was Just an Accident,\u201d plus \u201cFrankenstein,\u201d \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d \u201cBugonia,\u201d \u201cDie My Love,\u201d \u201cHamnet,\u201d \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee,\u201d \u201cSentimental Value\u201d and \u201cJay Kelly.\u201d Many of the key titles will likely be getting a sizeable push from studios and streamers hoping to impress the British capital\u2019s growing number of resident AMPAS, BAFTA and Golden Globe voters as awards season kicks into gear. There are also eight features world premiering, including British boxing drama \u201cGiant.\u201d The festival closes with Julia Jackson\u2019s \u201c100 Nights of Hero\u201d on Oct. 19, with the hope that the film\u2019s all-star cast \u2014\u00a0including Charli xcx \u2014\u00a0will be in attendance. <\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking to Variety ahead of the event, festival director Kristy Matheson discussed the importance \u2014\u00a0or not \u2014\u00a0of landing world premieres, accepting that protest may take center stage and, with Tilly Norwood<\/a> still causing a stir, the prospect of programming a film starring an AI creation.<\/p>\n

\t\tHow are you feeling about this year\u2019s edition of the festival?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m really excited. We sort of start in January, looking at works in progress over the winter, but really we\u2019re viewing finished films from January onward. And even by the time we sort of got out of the winter festivals, the program team and I were thinking it was going to be very, very busy. And then, as we headed into the spring and the summer the abundance of films kept coming. It didn\u2019t seem to slow, which made for some pretty tough program meetings toward the end, because there were so many things that we really liked. But yeah, I\u2019m really proud of the program.<\/p>\n

\t\tI know you\u2019re can\u2019t really single things out, but is there anything you\u2019re particularly excited about?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThis year we\u2019re have a very large scale installation called \u201cNowIsWhenWeAre (the stars),\u201d and it\u2019s created by an artist called Andrew Schneider. It\u2019s very immersive, with over 4000 reactive LED lights and a soundscape made up of something insane, like over 450 different channels of sound. So you walk in and you are in the cosmos. I\u2019m very excited about that, because it\u2019s something I haven\u2019t actually got to see myself yet. <\/p>\n

\t\tThere\u2019s obviously an obsession with festivals having world premieres. London usually managed to carve out a few bigger name titles to debut and last year opened with the world premiere of \u201cBlitz,\u201d but there aren\u2019t any major studio titles bowing this time around. Is it becoming more difficult to negotiate premieres from studios and streamers?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWe sit in a luxurious corridor in the sense that we come after all the major summer festivals. And I think that you could look at that as a real disadvantage, but for myself and the programming team, it feels like a real sense of freedom. There\u2019s so many films that gets that get launched in this period and we\u2019re an audience facing festival. That\u2019s who we program for and who the festival really is for and in terms of audiences, last year with admissions at 230,000 there\u2019s a lot of audience appetite here for the festival. But I think that this idea of chasing world premieres takes a lot of energy. And I feel for audiences, they\u2019re not as interested in the world premiere. As a curator, it\u2019s very important to not lose sight of the audience.<\/p>\n

\t\tFestivals have always been platforms for protests but this year more than ever given what\u2019s going on in the world, especially in Gaza. Are you anticipating protest to play a major part of this edition of the festival, even if not related to any of the films?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re running a festival which is a large public event. And so, by very nature of it being a large public event, we\u2019re always planning for those moments to happen. Primarily when we\u2019re putting the festival together, there\u2019s obviously a lot of thinking that goes into the production and for us it\u2019s about making sure that we can present the films in a space that\u2019s safe and that feels very comfortable for our filmmakers and audiences. But I think that people need to express feelings. The point of art is that it brings up a lot of ideas and emotions, so by its very nature it\u2019s a space where people want to have dialog. So I think that\u2019s a very normal thing to happen within a festival.<\/p>\n

\t\tSo beyond the aspects of safety, there\u2019s not going to be any effort to diminish any of that?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re always mindful, but we certainly don\u2019t want a situation where we wouldn\u2019t want people to be able to express their feelings.<\/p>\n

\t\tAnother hot topic is AI and we\u2019re all seen the recent uproar and debate about Tilly Norwood. Has AI infiltrated the festival in any way? Does anyone use a little ChatGPT to write the program or anything like that?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tNo! I told someone recently I had to write all my synopses. And they said, oh, you should just get ChatGPT to do it. And I was like, what? It was a very like old lady moment. But no, we don\u2019t use it. We schedule with humans in a room, and we write all of our notes at a computer.<\/p>\n

\t\tWould you ever allow a film to be programmed starring an AI actress on your watch?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWho knows! It could be happening and I don\u2019t even know! It feels like we\u2019re in a very strange space between two worlds. Maybe this is what people felt like when photography happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival \u2014\u00a0the biggest film event in the U.K. \u2014 kicks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,127517,153748,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-480543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-london-film-festival","13":"tag-tilly-norwood","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115333265124672181","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}