Student Film Festival London

Earlier this week, two of London’s biggest film festivals unleashed the programmes for their 2011 editions. With a combined total of over 500 films on show, October looks set to be a busy month for film fans in the capital. Here’s a little taster of what’s in store:

55th BFI London Film Festival, 12th – 27th October

Opening with Fernando Meirelles 360 and closing with Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, LFF offers a host of premieres to get excited about. Star power is provided by the likes of George Clooney’s new directorial effort The Ides of March and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Mind (which stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Keira Knightley as the patient they fell out over). Clooney’s previous effort behind the camera on Good Night, and Good Luck. proved that he has an extraordinary flair for dramatising political stories, while the birth of psychoanalysis seems like exciting territory for a director like Cronenberg.

Coming from the opposite end of the American filmmaking spectrum come two films from defiantly independent director Joe Swanberg: Silver Bullets and Uncle Kent. A regular presence at LFF since the 2007 screening of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the prolific Swanberg has proven time and again that a small budget needn’t be a barrier to making compelling drama.

Meanwhile, the New British Cinema strand shows that there’s plenty going on closer to home.

Andrew Haigh’s gay romance Weekend caused a splash at SXSW earlier this year, and if D R Hood’s excellent shorts are anything to go by, her debut feature Wreckers will be well worth a look. And, while we’re talking British cinema, let’s not forget Andrea Arnold’s new film of Wuthering Heights, produced by our very own Kevin Loader.

For those who prefer their films factual, new films from the likes of Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin – You Betcha!) and documentary legend Frederick Wiseman (Crazy Horse) should keep you busy, while the Family Gala of Tales of the Night promises enough striking (3D) visuals to keep animation fans happy. Finally, two films built around correspondence between filmmakers (José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas in Correspondence: Jonas Mekas – JL Guerin, Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso in The Lord Worked Wonders in Me), could well prove to be the highlights on this year’s Experimenta strand.

19th Raindance Film Festival, 28th September – 9th October

Kicking off Raindance will be the UK premiere of Mike Cahill’s sci-fi drama Another Earth, which received standing ovations when it played at Sundance earlier this year. Star power this time is provided by Johnny Daukes’ Acts of Godfrey, featuring Simon Callow, Harry Enfield and Iain Robertson, and Dana Lustig’s A Thousand Kisses Deep starring Dougray Scott, Jodie Whittaker and Emilia Fox. Daukes’ film is a black comedy told entirely in rhyming couplets, while Lustig’s is a thriller which promises to ‘recreate the psycho-analytic experience’.

Elsewhere in the festival is our top tip, Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal’s award-winning Stranger Things. Telling the story of a grieving woman’s developing bond with a mysterious homeless man, the film has been praised by Variety and also helped earn Burke and Eyal a place in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Another potential highlight is the UK Premiere of Alex Ross Perry’s black and white The Color Wheel, a comedy about an aspiring news-anchor’s road-trip to reclaim her belongings from her ex-lover’s apartment.

The festival closes with Chilean director Christian Jimenez’s ‘slacker romance’ Bonsai. Based on a novel of the same name which is loosely structured around Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the film follows an ill-fated love affair between two literature students through the years.

Alex Barrett