BEST OF LFF 2015

My verdict on the 20 titles that I caught at the 2015 BFI 59th Annual London Film Festival. Alas, for the first time since my first fest, I did not see the film which the official jury declared Best Film from Official Competition - Athina Rachel Tsangari's Chevalier. But I did see very many other great films, including four 4-star films, the most of my three visits here to date. Only one award per film, so worthy winners in more than one category have had to make to with just the one win, making way for other films to prevail elsewhere.

Best Film
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
Last year's winner: From What Is Before (Lav Diaz)

Special Mention for Best Film
Park Lanes (Kevin Jerome Everson)
Last year's winner: Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (Wiam Simav Bedirxan and Ossama Mohammmed)

Runners-up for Best Film / Special Mention
The Forbidden Room (Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin) / Carol (Todd Haynes)

Best Directing
Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin (The Forbidden Room)
Runners-up: Hou Hsiao Hsien (The Assassin) / Kevin Jerome Everson (Park Lanes)
Last year's winner: Aleksey German (Hard to Be a God)

Best Female Actor
Kwon So Hyun (Madonna)
Runners-up: Rooney Mara (Carol) / Cate Blanchett (Carol)
Last year's winner: Li Yi Qing (Dearest)

Best Male Actor
Ralph Ineson (The Witch)
Runners-up: Karim Pakachakov (Under Electric Clouds) / Ralph Fiennes (A Bigger Splash)
Last year's winner: Body / Luke (White God)

Best Screenplay
Phyllis Nagy (Carol)
Runners-up: Aleksey German (Under Electric Clouds) / Robert Eggers (The Witch)
Last year's winner: Lisandro Alonso and Fabian Casas (Jauja)

Artistic or Technical Achievement
Elena Okopnaya (Under Electric Clouds) - art direction
Runners-up: Lee Ping Bin (The Assassin) - cinematography / Huang Chih Chia and Liao Ching Song (The Assassin) - editing
Last year's winner: Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira (The Duke of Burgundy) - music

LFF REVIEW - THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (EVAN JOHNSON AND GUY MADDIN)

Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin reimagine, repurpose and recreate the old as new, faithful yet never entirely genuine, wildly entertaining for the most part, wholly fascinating for the whole part. The Forbidden Room is a dazzlingly rich trinket in analogue and digital, an exercise in digression that has a singular purpose, original presented as counterfeit and vice versa - it faces both forwards and backwards and mines all conceivable value from every angle. As you begin to deduce the methods behind Johnson and Maddin's madness, the reasons herein, be it mental manipulation of the physical, the relationship between lost experience and rediscovered dream, or the sexualisation of life represented in the sexualisation of The Forbidden Room's Russian Doll-like structure, you'll eventually come to question the veracity of any of these reasons, not least since reason itself seems absent from the film. Yet this is precisely the reason - it is only what it is unto itself, often a film unto itself as the credits appear repeatedly mid-movie, further disguising the distinction between reality and fantasy. To ask why is irrelevant, because you simply needn't ask - the intellectualisation of the experience exists only for its own inquiry, and a more appropriate question to ask might be 'why not'? The Forbidden Room is baffling, and delightfully so, funny, and fantastically so, artistically astounding, the product of minds in full mastery of their method, which is indeed deeply mad. It's also distressingly post-racial in the most unpleasant manner for one otherwise excellent sequence, if we're to look at the film objectively; it rather repels such a style of analysis however, and the merits of The Forbidden Room more than outstrip the effect of this minor misstep.

TRAILER FOR EVAN JOHNSON AND GUY MADDIN'S THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

The reviews that have rung in for Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room since its Sundance premiere in January have been among the finest of Maddin's esteemed career. An extensive festival rollout ensues as the year reaches prime fest season, with screenings at Telluride, New York and London. Out in NYC on the 7th of October.