The 65th BFI London Film Festival Announces Full 2021 Programme

• Opening with the World Premiere of Jeymes Samuel’s THE HARDER THEY FALL

• Closing with Joel Coen’s THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH

• American Express Gala is Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG

The 65^th BFI London Film Festival (LFF) in partnership with American Express has announced the full 2021 programme line-up that will be presented both in cinemas and virtually, incorporating some of the most popular elements of the successful 2020 edition into the full large scale Festival model. Over twelve days from 6 – 17 October, flagship venue BFI Southbank and the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, the LFF Gala venue for 2021, will make London’s South Bank one of two London hub’s at the heart of the film festival experience.

Each night of the Festival a Gala will screen at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall across an 18-metre screen with full high-spec 7.1 channel surround sound ensuring every seat in the over-2000-seater venue is the best in the house. Films in Official Competition will be presented at BFI Southbank itself with a host of London cinemas also screening titles from the programme including: Odeon West End, the Prince Charles Cinema, ICA, Curzon Soho and Curzon Mayfair. 

OPENING & CLOSING FILMS

As previously announced, this year’s Opening Film will be Netflix’s THE HARDER THEY FALL, directed by Londoner Jeymes Samuel. The film will receive its World Premiere at LFF gala venue the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, with Samuel expected to attend along with key cast. The Festival closes with Joel Coen’s bold and fierce adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic play, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH from Apple Original Films and A24. The film will receive its European Premiere at the LFF, with Joel Coen expected to attend. Both films will be available atLFF partner cinemas across the UK, with THE HARDER THEY FALL also going to a wider network of cinemas.

HEADLINE GALAS

This year’s American Express Gala is the beguilingly dark drama THE POWER OF THE DOG from Oscar® and Palme d’Or winning filmmaker Jane Campion starring a fantastic international cast including Oscar® nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

This year’s American Airlines Gala is Kenneth Branagh’s BELFAST, drawing on his own experiences to tell the story of a young boy living in Belfast in the late 1960s as increasing social unrest and conflict is explored through a child’s-eye perspective. THE FRENCH DISPATCH, Wes Anderson’s delightful, star-studded homage to journalism and literary magazines is a feast for the eyes and a whip-smart comic delight. 

Paul Verhoeven returns to psychosexual melodrama with BENEDETTA, a spectacular new genre blend about Catholic mystic and lesbian, Sister Benedetta Carlini, that tells a story that scandalised Florence in the early 1600s when an infamous nun rose to local power as a mystic, but was subsequently charged with committing heretic acts.Will Smith delivers one of his best performances as the ambitious father of the Williams sisters in captivating biopic KING RICHARD, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, which tells the story of a father who has his sights firmly set on superstardom for his two young daughters, Venus and Serena.

In Edgar Wright’s LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, a young woman is transported back to the 1960s in an endlessly inventive, time-travelling horror fantasy starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Thomasin McKenzie and Matt Smith with captivating support from a host of British acting legends including Diana Rigg, in her last film role. This year’s BFI Patrons’ Gala is MOTHERING SUNDAY, a beautiful adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel, starring Josh O’Connor and Odessa Young, from screenwriter Alice Birch and director Eva Husson, in which a writer has a creative awakening steeped in books, love and loss.

THE LOST DAUGHTER is the astonishingly assured directorial debut from Maggie Gyllenhaal. As psychologically rich as a great book, Gyllenhaal crafts scenes of pleasure, regret, mystery and peril, always offering a thrilling sense of not knowing exactly what will happen next in this tangled and messy human tale. is Joanna Hogg’s glorious follow up to The Souvenir is The Londoner Gala, supported by our 2021 Hotel Partner.THE SOUVENIR: PART II sees Honor Swinton Byrne returning as Julie for this rich auto-fictional portrait of the birth of a filmmaker.

The much-anticipated SPENCER will screen as part of the Festival Pablo Larraín’s sublime ‘fable from a true tragedy’ imagines a Christmas weekend at Sandringham in the early 1990s, as an unhappy Princess Diana contemplates saying ‘no’. Played with intoxicating perfection by Kristen Stewart, who dominates almost every scene, Larraín ingeniously depicts the world of the young princess. This year’s LFF Family Gala will be British animation’s RON’S GONE WRONG. Ron is a walking, talking, digitally-connected B*Bot whois malfunctioning and Barney, a socially awkward middle-schooler, just wants to make his “Best Friend out of the Box” right, sending them on an action-packed journey in which boy and robot come to terms with the wonderful messiness of true friendship. Locksmith Animation’s hilarious and touching debut starring Zach Galifianakis, Jack Dylan Grazer, Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Rob Delaney, is sure to delight audiences young and old.

This year’s Headline Galas are:

• American Express Gala – THE POWER OF THE DOG (d. Jane Campion)
• American Airlines Gala BELFAST (d. Kenneth Branagh)
• THE FRENCH DISPATCH (d. Wes Anderson)
• BENEDETTA (d. Paul Verhoeven)
• KING RICHARD (d. Reinaldo Marcus Green)
• LAST NIGHT IN SOHO d. (Edgar Wright)
• BFI Patrons’ Gala – MOTHERING SUNDAY (d. Eva Husson)
• THE LOST DAUGHTER (d. Maggie Gyllenhaal)
• The Londoner Gala – THE SOUVENIR: PART II (d. Joanna Hogg)
• SPENCER (d. Pablo Larraín)
• RON’S GONE WRONG (d. Sarah Smith, Jean Philippe-Vine)

Also screening at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, this year’s Special Presentations are:

• The Mayor of London’s Special Presentation – ALI & AVA (d. Clio Barnard)
• DRIVE MY CAR (d. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
• BENEDICTION (d. Terence Davies)
• GREAT FREEDOM (d. Sebastian Meise)
• THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN (d. Craig Roberts) – in association with Empire Magazine
• MEMORIA (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – in association with Sight and Sound –
• TITANE (d. Julia Ducournau) – in association with Time Out
• PARIS, 13^TH DISTRICT (d. Jacques Audiard)
• THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (d. Todd Haynes)
• BFI Flare Special Screening – FLEE (d. Jonas Poher Rasmussen)
• Experimenta Special Screening – NEPTUNE FROST (d. Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman)
• Series Special Screening – SUCCESSION (Creator-Showrunner Jesse Armstrong)

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

The Mayor of London’s Special Presentation is Clio Barnard’s latest film ALI & AVA which charts an unlikely romance between two Bradford residents through an intelligent and nuanced depiction of 21^st century Britain that addresses neurodiversity, race and class dynamics and mental health. Inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR takes audiences on an unpredictable and self-revelatory journey in this serene yet riveting drama. This is an intense and sensorially rich film, sustained by great performances and bold long takes that will screen to audiences on Saturday 9 October.

Terence Davies’ BENEDICTION evocatively explores the life of Siegfried Sassoon, known for his poetry on the horrors of the Great War, but also his love affairs with other notable men. In his first film about an openly gay man, Davies casts Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi to play poet Sassoon as a young man and in later life.  Winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes, Sebastian Meise’s GREAT FREEDOM is a searing prison drama and a captivating chronicle of queer history. It is a hard-hitting, often uncompromising piece of work, yet beneath its tough exterior lies a deeply unsentimental, disarmingly tender love story that is almost impossible to forget.

This year’s Special Presentation in association with Empire is the delightful and charming THE PHANTOM OF THE OPEN from director Craig Roberts. A tribute to Maurice Flitcroft, the ‘world’s worst golfer’, who secures a coveted spot in the qualifying round of the 1976 British Open, this is a heartfelt celebration of an eternal optimist who never let his sporting inadequacies stand in the way of his dreams. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s beguiling rumination on memory and the human condition, MEMORIA screens as a Special Presentation in association with Sight and Sound, Tilda Swinton stars as a woman visiting her sister in Bogota, who becomes obsessed with finding an explanation for a mysterious sound. Our Special Presentation in association with Time Out is Julia Ducournau’s electrifying techno-chiller TITANE, one of the most provocative Palme d’Or winners ever, and only the second for a female director.  French filmmaker Ducournau dazzled with cannibal-themed debut Raw which won the Sutherland Award at LFF in 2016 but goes way further in her genre-shattering follow-up. It’s extreme-dream cinema.

Twice Best Film Winner at LFF, Jacques Audiard returns with PARIS, 13^TH DISTRICT, a film which ventures into new territory with a vibrant take on love and Paris, as four characters cross amorous paths in the modern city. Based on three stories by graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, Audiard (with co-writers Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius) offers a panorama of love, desire and everyday survival in a racially, culturally, sexually diverse contemporary city. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND is a riveting tribute to the beloved band from director Todd Haynes who employs dynamic use of split-screens to examine the cultural amniotic fluid that nurtured the band – the experimental music, art, film and fashion, and of course, the coalescing influence of their early ‘manager’ Andy Warhol, who instigated happenings at The Factory around them.

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance Film Festival, this year’s BFI Flare Special Presentation is FLEE. This tender interview between film director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and his school friend Amin, years after they first met, blossoms into an extraordinary story of love, survival and resilience. The Experimenta Special Presentation is NEPTUNE FROST, the directorial debut of poet-musician Saul Williams and actor-playwright Anisia Uzeyman. An exhilarating anti-capitalist sci-fi musical entirely shot in Rwanda and made with an entirely Rwandan and Burundian cast and crew, the film presents an intoxicatingly original way to explore economic inequality specific to this mining region of Africa.

The acclaimed SUCCESSION is this year’s inaugural Series Special Screening with the Festival delighted to share episodes 1 and 2 from the much-anticipated third season. The Roys are back in town with the return of Jesse Armstrong’s critically lauded and award-winning series about vicious power struggles within a US media corporation, and the family that runs it.

The LFF is one of Britain’s leading cinema events and one of the world’s most important film festivals and the programme offers audiences the chance to be the first to see some of the most anticipated new films from around the globe, including a host of new works destined to be major awards contenders. The LFF competitive sections will return recognising remarkable creative filmmaking achievements, and be presented at BFI Southbank. The winners will be selected by a soon-to-be announced jury across four categories: Official Competition, First Feature, Documentary and Short Film and The LFF Audience Award, introduced in 2021, with Festival-goers voting for their favourite film of the Festival. The winner of the IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Bursary Award in association with BFI will also be announced at the virtual Awards Ceremony.

The 65^th BFI London Film Festival (LFF) will take place over twelve days from 6 – 17 October.

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