BFI London Film Festival

A conservative family in Pakistan is torn apart when a son falls in love with a transgender erotic dancer, in Saim Sadiq’s riveting queer drama.

The Best Film winner at the 2013 BFI London Film Festival is an exquisitely shot, moving drama about a Polish nun exploring her family past, from UK-based director Pawel Pawlikowski.

Florence Pugh shines in this exceptional British debut of a young wife's need for freedom, whatever the cost.

A city-loving teacher struggling for inspiration travels to the most remote school in the world in this quietly majestic Academy Award-nominated drama.

A closeted PE teacher reckons with her identity during Thatcherite Britain in Georgia Oakley’s delicate yet gripping BAFTA-nominated debut.

Winner of Best Film at the 2014 London Film Festival, the latest film from Andrey Zvyagintsev (Elena) is a gripping study of corrupt politics in modern Russia.

The psychedelic physicality of this mortal coil – journey into the systems that comprise the human body in this fascinating sensory experience.

In artist Del Kathryn Barton’s dazzling feature debut, a young girl retreats into a fantasy world to cope with witnessing a horrifying act of violence.

Mark Jenkin follows Bait with this chilling, endlessly mysterious folk horror tale, beautifully shot on grainy 16mm.

Set in Donetsk against the backdrop of the downing of Malaysian flight MH17 in 2014, a Ukrainian family attempts to live a normal life amid the absurdity and futility of conflict, in Maryna Er Gorbach’s visually striking film.

This riveting feature debut from Makbul Mubarak patiently details the journey of a young man as he begins to taste power for the first time.

One dress changes everything for a family in Dionne Edwards’ brilliant debut. Defiant, uplifting and with music at its core.

She just did what! Attention-seeking Signe will do anything to keep the focus on herself, in this wildly demented comedy.

A fisherman’s son is offered a place at a prestigious Islamic school in Cairo and finds himself drawn into a religious and political power struggle.

Edward Lovelace explores the power of communication and community with this rapturous portrait of a young deaf Kurdish boy.

Acclaimed Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman returns with another deadpan take on life in exile that is typically assured and moving.

In Nana Mensah’s self-assured and charming comedy, a Ghanaian-American woman’s life is thrown into disarray when she inherits her mother’s Christian bookshop.

A lavish trip to the Turkish Riviera goes horribly awry in this disturbing tale of power, exploitation and complicity from the writer of Border.

In this London-set drama, the Baptiste family are caught in intergenerational debates reflecting Black viewpoints on life in Britain.

The joint winner of the Cannes Jury Prize and Academy Award-nominated, EO is a strangely wonderful tale where the dark and light of humanity is laid bare.

Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Stoker) channels Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, to create a sumptuous twisty psychological thriller full of erotic intrigue.

A beautiful blood-red dress unleashes a curse on its wearers in Peter Strickland's erotic and twisted horror.

An unnervingly brilliant portrait of the ways in which the Pinochet dictatorship realised its brute force and pervasive influence, from debut director Manuela Martelli. Winner of the 2022 BFI London Film Festival First Feature Competition.

Impeccably styled and unflinchingly grim, this darkly humorous tale of a pop star past his prime finds Ulrich Seidl at his audacious best.

Twenty-five years old and newly restored, Gary Oldman’s BAFTA-winning debut as writer-director remains a magnificent achievement.

The investigation into a series of unexplained deaths hints to the supernatural, in this thrillingly unconventional police procedural.

Juliet Bashore’s queer docufiction, starring Tigr and real-life girlfriend porn star Sharon Mitchell, was shot in and celebrates the heady days of the San Francisco underground in the 1980s.

Tilda Swinton stars in the first English-language feature from master filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul; a mesmerising and beautifully immersive work.

Romantic sparks fly between the daughters of two opposing politicians in Wanuri Kahiu’s neon-bright story of forbidden love in Kenya.

Akira Kurosawa’s first colour film is an eccentric and joyous account of a group of disparate people living in a city dump.

A quest to return a lost Oscar®-statuette propels this heart-warming comedy; a charming tribute to the power of cinema.

Marcos Mereles’ archly funny, endlessly inventive and reflexive puzzle piece explores a strange disappearance at a hip London fashion shoot.

Kristen Stewart reunites with Olivier Assayas to play an A-List celebrity's personal shopper, who keeps receiving strange text messages from an unknown source.

A lifelong friendship is tested by tragedy in this atmospheric and intense first feature from acclaimed British shorts director Fyzal Boulifa.

The film that Martin Scorsese compared to ‘opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed’.

Yorgos Lanthimos' scary, witty tale of a dysfunctional Greek family is original, ingenious and sadly relevant as a study of parent-child relationships

Amat Escalante follows Heli with a boundary-pushing, mind-blowing mix of sex, sci-fi and social drama.

Ruth Rendell provides the source novel for this delicious tale of deception and identity, from the master of mischievous melodrama, François Ozon.

Simon Bird’s directorial debut is a warm and witty graphic novel adaptation about a single librarian trying to reconnect with her introverted, metalhead teenage son.

Berlin Golden Bear winner, Radu Jude’s scathing satire finds schoolteacher Emi threatened with dismissal when a private sex tape goes viral.

Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel returns with a fine adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s existential novel. In her first feature since 2008’s The Headless Woman, Martel creates a richly layered exploration of personal malaise.

Based on Jerzy Kosiński’s 1965 novel and a long time in the making, Václav Marhoul’s extraordinary The Painted Bird finds a lone Jewish boy on a dark odyssey towards home during wartime.

Blistering thriller of a teen groomed to work for a brutal, organised drugs network.

The directorial debut of poet-musician Saul Williams and actor-playwright Anisia Uzeyman is an exhilarating anti-capitalist sci-fi musical entirely shot in Rwanda.

Acclaimed choreographer Akram Khan’s new creation is captured by Academy Award winner Asif Kapadia (Senna), in this immersive and stunning film.

Hope Dickson Leach's hugely impressive first feature about a middle class farming family’s crisis, set against the backdrop of the Somerset floods.

Nominated for two Oscars (Best Actress – Melissa Leo - and Best Original Screenplay) Frozen River is a riveting thriller that raises questions about the borders we construct, between countries, communities and each other.

A young woman seeking her biological mother journeys into dangerous territory in this gripping psychological thriller from Irish directing duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.

Two self-confessed hedonists wreak wanton havoc in Věra Chytilová's visually spectacular neo-dadaist farce.

Andrea Arnold’s highly acclaimed film, winner of top prizes at Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival, is a haunting drama about a woman confronting past demons.

A teenage tearaway is forced to face up to his actions and confront his burgeoning sexuality, in this provocative Slovenian coming-of-age tale.

Peter Strickland’s visually and aurally intoxicating tale of sadomasochistic power-play is a daringly erotic sensory feast.

Frank Sidebottom was a pillar of alternative comedy of the late 80s/early 90s, and this charming documentary remembers the man behind the papier-mâché head.

Michael Haneke's Cannes prizewinner, set in a pre-WW1 German village, explores the oppressively strict social conditions that gave rise to Nazism

A gay pick-up turns into a dangerous game of betrayal and violence in this slyly subversive and compelling thriller.

Living in the sand dunes just outside the city of Timbuktu, a cattle herder and his wife find their peaceful existence disturbed by forces attempting to dictate their lifestyle.

Ivan Sen follows his acclaimed Australian thriller Mystery Road with another distinctive, 'outback noir', with troubled indigenous detective Joe Swan (Aaron Pedersen) again on the trail of murder and corruption.

Florence Pugh's first film teams her with Maisie Williams as teenage friends at a school cursed by mystery sickness.

An outstanding debut feature charting the emotional journey of a six-year old girl in the aftermath of her mother’s death in early 1990s Spain.

Jessica Hausner’s cool, witty and unsettling sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw.

A stylistically dazzling and ambitious Italian adaptation of Jack London’s autobiographical novel about a self-taught and outspoken working-class writer who climbs the ranks of society.

Fernando Trueba's deeply moving meditation on the artistic process and the nature of humanity, with Jean Rochefort as an ageing artist inspired to paint once more.

The long-awaited second feature from Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence) is a gorgeously surreal coming-of-age tale laced with bizarre body-horror.

Masculine tensions reaching boiling point in this sizzling, brilliantly observed neo-western, where migrant German construction workers are pitched against villagers in remotest Bulgaria.

The BFI Archive's restoration of Herbert Ponting's official film record of Captain Scott's tragic expedition to the South Pole, with a new score by Simon Fisher Turner.

Ming-Liang Tsai's outrageous blend of sex, comedy, musical and drama is a daring, controversial and hilarious smorgasbord from one of Taiwan's most acclaimed directors.

Antonioni’s masterpiece of modern alienation, with Monica Vitti as the young woman searching for her friend who's inexplicably disappeared.

This early masterpiece from Werner Herzog stars Klaus Kinski as a power-crazed explorer in sixteenth-century South America who leads a band of conquistadors through the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow-up to his Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep is a persuasive portrait of a young writer at odds with his hometown and family.

Modern master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Celyan’s Palme d’Or winner: an extraordinary, epic drama.

A modern masterpiece from major filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, following police and prosecutors as they escort a murderer through the bleak Anatolian steppes in search of a buried body.

Desiree Akhavan directs and stars in this witty, razor-sharp and fearless comedy following the sexual misadventures of a bisexual Brooklynite.

Clio Barnard's film about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar mixes reconstruction, interviews (performed by actors) and scenes from the plays.

On a Tuscan break a fortysomething woman finds herself drawn to the company of a group of partying teens, including a young Tom Hiddleston (in one of his earliest roles).

Andrea Arnold's bold re-imagining of the Emily Brontë classic.

A hard-hitting and often graphic documentary about the 'chemsex' sub-scene in London’s gay community.

An Aboriginal cop returns to his hometown to solve the brutal murder of a teenage girl, uncovering a web of corruption and a growing body count, in Ivan Sen's acclaimed Australian riff on the Western genre.

Beautifully shot documentary about four members of the 'Sudanese Film Club' who decide to revive an old cinema.

Peter Greenaway became a director of international status with this witty, stylised, erotic country house murder mystery.

In modern Liverpool, a couple meet and begin a transgressive, sexually charged affair set against a background of crime and encroaching danger.

This stylish, cult 1966 erotic thriller stars French New Wave icons Jean-Louis Trintigant and Marie-France Pisier.

Following a fatal car crash involving a swan outside a zoo, twin-brother zoologists Oliver and Oswald become fascinated by the processes of decay.

Todd Solondz directs Selma Blair and Jordan Gelber in this delightfully dark satire as romance blooms between a toy collector and a depressed woman.

A new arrival at a school for young deaf people is drawn into a nightmarish world of crime and brutality, in this audacious and acclaimed modern classic told in unsubtitled sign.

David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) made his feature debut in 1994 with this biting black comedy, which caused a stir with its incestuous subplot and portrayal of adolescent restlessness.

Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone presents a masterful tale of twisted friendship, not-so-petty crime and revenge.