The full line-up for the 56th BFI London Film Festival was unveiled this morning, with 225 feature films and 111 shorts from 65 countries making the list. 11 of these features come from our own Emerald Isle, with 2 shorts also making the cut.
The big draw will be Lenny Abrahamson’s third film What Richard Did, starring up-and-coming Irish actor Jack Reynor as a young man who has it all and loses it in a spectacularly bad summer night out. The film which is adapted from Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock also stars Sam Keeley, Róisín Murphy, Lorraine Pilkington and Danish star Lars Mikkelsen.
Other films to look out for are Gerard Barrett’s Pilgrim Hill, a hard-hitting exploration of life in rural Ireland; Pat Collins’ Silence, a poetic look at sound, memory and exile; Ciarán Foy’s Citadel, a story about an agoraphobic father who teams up with a renegade priest to save his daughter from the clutches of a gang of twisted feral children. All of these promise to be brilliant in their own way.
Alongside Citadel 4 other Irish and British co-productions make the list: Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations, a look at Belfast’s punk-rock scene starring Dylan Moran; Kieran Evans’ Kelly + Victor, a love story adapted from Niall Griffiths acclaimed novel; Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema; and Marc Issacs’ The Road: A Story of Life and Death, a history of the A5, one of Britain’s longest and oldest roads.
3 other films feature: Óskar Jónasson’s Legends of Valhalla – Thor (Co-production with Iceland and Germany), Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (Co-production with USA), and Nick Ryan’s The Summit (Co-production with Switzerland).
The two shorts are Kealan O’Rourke’s The Boy in the Bubble, and Lorcan Finnegan’s Foxes.
The 56th BFI London Film Festival runs from October 10 – October 21. More info here.