BEST OF LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2016 - THE SOS LFF AWARDS

With the 60th BFI London Film Festival having now graciously agreed to shut up shop and give me a break from watching masterpieces, it's time to conclude SOS' coverage of the fest with my LFF 2016 awards! Lots of brilliant films at this year's event, indeed so many that there are several deserving award-winners that barely even got a look in! To clarify, only one award was allocated per film, so there may be some cases where a film would have claimed more than one award, but was relegated to runner-up status by virtue of having won a different award. You can check out last year's winners at this link, and this year's below:

Best Film
My Life as a Courgette (Claude Barras)

Best Film - Special Mention
Raw (Julia Ducournau)
Runners-up: The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz), The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra), Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)

Best Direction
Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left)
Runners-up: Claude Barras (My Life as a Courgette), Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann)

Best Performance by a Female Actor
Kirin Kiki (After the Storm)
Runners-up: Charo Santos-Concio (The Woman Who Left), Rooney Mara (Una)

Best Performance by a Male Actor
Jean-Pierre Leaud (The Death of Louis XIV)
Runners-up: John Lloyd Cruz (The Woman Who Left), Ben Mendelsohn (Una)

Best Screenplay
Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann)
Runners-up: Claude Barras, Morgan Navarro, Celine Sciamma and Germano Zullo (My Life as a Courgette), Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left)

Artistic or Technical Achievement
Paul Atkins, Matthew Bramante, Erik de Boer, Dan Glass, Kevin O'Neill and Bruce Woloshyn (Voyage of Time: Life's Journey) - cinematography and visual effects
Runners-up: Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left) - cinematography, Olivier Affonso and Amelie Grossier (Raw) - makeup

LFF 2016 REVIEW - THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (ALBERT SERRA)

The view from within, a sight of a most public figure yet also one most secluded and now, approaching death, most isolated. Alone in his experience, yet surrounded by doctors, advisers and valets, facing down a situation wholly unusual and profound to the individual, yet entirely universal, Albert Serra depicts the Sun King, Louis XIV, from a perspective that only he could have devised, or realized in such a fashion. The Death of Louis XIV is sumptuous - bright, burnished gold and blood red sizzling through the screen, an entire world created in a single room, ably populated by a cast of characters inhabited vividly yet subtly by a fine ensemble. It is absurd - the degrading humanization of a man regarded as more than a mere human, the plain, unavoidable, unpretentious physicality of his agonizing descent toward death, yet plied with Alicante wine to simply dribble over his closed lips, or dressed in a fur stole atop his drab bedclothes. It is palpably real - close confines and excellent performances render this extraordinary environment realistic, even amid grandeur and artifice, both artistic and emotional. Serra pushes Jean-Pierre Leaud further than any other director in recent years, and pushes himself to refine his outlook without abandoning the distinctive philosophical and stylistic character of his alternative historical essays, and both succeed magnificently. With typically piquant, gently irreverent humour, The Death of Louis XIV is a genuine intimate epic, and Leaud's presence (and sporadic, eventually oppressive absence) permits it further import for the contemporary audience: the death of a cinema legend in the death of a historical one.