What does a film festival do when festivity is banned?

It is often said that crises lead to change, but the changes we make when in crisis mode reveal our essential natures more than any planned or premeditated actions do. In the classic 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, when the US suburbs are infected by a zombie apocalypse, the mindless hordes continue to perform the one habitual ability they have left: they go to the mall. In times of coronavirus, when the higher functions of sociability are denied and even the malls close down, we go en masse online.

Lockdown has been a boom time for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, whose captive global audience is of a scale that dwarfs the ‘Major Studios’ of Hollywood yore. But while film may be thriving as entertainment, cinema as an institution is in grave peril, its production halted; and theatrical exhibition trickled to a socially-distanced minimum.

The Cannes Festival cancelled all its offline events as a response to the first wave of the pandemic back in June. If our autumn heralds a grim sequel to those early summer times, the BFI London Film Festival’s hybrid programme seeks to avoid such disruption, balancing online and in-person activity in a way that is neither lockdown nor normality. Tickets are on sale to reduced-capacity auditoriums over the festival. Around 100 fewer feature films are being exhibited this year, with only 58 titles to choose from and no Official Competition category. While film production was halted internationally this year, this slow-down will only really be apparent at next year’s festival. This year, one can assume that the larger distribution companies have decided to scale back their involvement, given that there are far fewer A-list titles than usual. Presumably the expense involved in shipping over the big stars and movie talent, plus all of the other promotional activities that the big companies usually devote to a festival, must not seem like a great investment when you’re playing to limited audiences, with no red carpet or gala events.

The withdrawal of the big-money releases leaves a more intimate and perhaps more diverse festival, which will play across the country both in cinemas and on streaming services. The festival opens with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, an appropriate choice to coincide with Black History Month, centring on the landmark true-life battle of Black activists ‘The Mangrove Nine’ against police racism. It ends with Ammonite, about palaeontologist Mary Anning, played by Kate Winslet (co-starring Saoirse Ronan). Both of these films indicate the continuing importance of historical drama to prestige British cinema.

The big festival-circuit hit playing this year is Nomadland, a chronicle of recession-era America starring Frances McDormand, winner of both the Toronto and Venice festivals this summer. In a historical what-if, Regina King’s One Night in Miami puts Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Sam Cooke together for in a hotel room one evening in 1964. An artistic partnership we eagerly anticipate is Spike Lee’s direction of Talking Heads singer David Byrne in American Utopia, a film of the Broadway musical. Meanwhile Supernova promises a two-hander between Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, both of whom advance previews report to be on top form.

Riz Ahmed stars as a British-Pakistani rapper who suffers a life-threatening illness in Mogul Mowgli. I also look forward to Relic, the directorial debut for Natalie Erika James and another entry into the increasingly rich body of contemporary horror cinema directed by women. Bad Tales promises a cynical take on human nature amid a group of family dramas set over one summer, a film made up of episodes and, thus, a format which seems to be making a comeback after films like Wild Tales, Certain Women and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I am also hoping it will provide a sighting of that increasingly rare animal, a modern Italian film worth getting excited about.

No contemporary director is better at bearing the continuing scars of Europe’s unhappy past than Christian Petzold, and so we are keen to watch Undine, a Berlin-set romance whose title refers to a mythic water nymph. Never Gonna Snow Again appears to be an intriguing Polish-German social satire on migration. Farewell Amor promises a more earnest, heartrending tale of exile as an Angolan man is reunited with his wife and daughter in New York.

From the still images I’ve seen, the Irish animation Wolfwalkers seems to be a beautifully inventive rendition of myth and legend in a time of colonialism. The festival also features a restoration of the banned and once presumed lost 1976 Iranian gothic film Chess of the Wind.

Perhaps the escapism of cinema and its grand picture palaces was always a historically limited model, destined one day inevitably to lose ground to the individualised, private sphere of the home. With video-on-demand already being the major way in which we watch films, driving the continuing proliferation of screen media into our homes, on our laps and our mobile devices, we were already a long way from the larger-than-life communal experience of the picture palace well before Covid-19 hit. The hybrid events at the festival, its nationwide reach and its more intimate roster suggest that even crisis can be a spur to new experiences and continued invention. We shall be back with our verdicts after a few weeks of assiduous home viewing.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place 7 to 18 October 2020. 

Photo Credit: Nomadland