The 60th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express®, closed having received record breaking attendance 184,700, an 18% increase from 157,000 in 2015, with the new temporary Embankment Garden Cinema contributing significantly to that growth. A further 8,200 people enjoyed the Festival through satellite screenings across the UK of Opening Night film Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom and Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World which, in a first for the Festival, was also made available online as a virtual premiere. UK-wide access brought the overall audience total to 193,129.
Filmmakers and cast attending the Festival in support of Headline Galas and Special Presentations included: Amma Asante, David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Jack Davenport, Tom Felton, Arnold Oceng, Jack Lowden, Laura Carmichael, Charlotte Hope, James Northcote, Jessica Oyelowo, Terry Pheto, Ben Wheatley, Michael Smiley, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, Cillian Murphy, Mark Monero, Armie Hammer, Tom Davis, Sharlto Copley, Enzo Cilenti, Babou Cessay, Patrick Bergin, Andrea Arnold, Sasha Lane, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Fiona Tan, Fisher Stevens, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nate Parker, Gabrielle Union, Chiké Okonkwo, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Ryan Gosling, Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Sigourney Weaver, Tom Ford, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Mira Nair, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, Joely Richardson, Rhys Ifans, Eric Kofi-Abrefa, Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Rachael Stirling and more.
At the annual BFI London Film Festival Award on Saturday, the LFF competition winners announced were:
- Certain Women – Kelly Reichardt, won the Best Film Award (Official Competition)
- Raw – Julia Ducournau, won the Sutherland Award (First Feature Competition)
- Starless Dreams – Mehrdad Oskouei, won the Grierson Award (Documentary Competition)
- 9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo – Issa Touma, Thomas Vroege and Floor van de Muelen, won the Short Film Award
(Reposted from The Guardian) This year’s BFI Fellowship was presented to the visionary Turner-prize-winning video artist, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen by his frequent collaborator Michael Fassbender. McQueen was accompanied by his producer wife Bianca Stigter and close family and friends to celebrate his receiving the highest accolade the BFI Board of Governors can bestow. McQueen is the first black director or producer to receive the film industry honour.
London-born McQueen, best known to film fans for his Oscar-winning epic story of a slave’s struggle for freedom in pre-civil war America, follows in the footsteps of Australian actress Cate Blanchett, who won the accolade last year, and British director Stephen Frears, who was honoured in 2014. Previous recipients include the late Sir Christopher Lee.
Fassbender described his friend as a “sensitive and dangerous” man as he introduced him, adding: “He’s like a very light hippo – an anomaly.”
McQueen used his acceptance speech to highlight the festival’s theme of encouraging diversity, describing himself as working class. “There are only two things I really know,” he said. “One of them is that I’m black and the other one is that I’m a Londoner. Everything else I don’t know. But I know I’ve had the possibility of exploring and of being reckless and of experimenting because I didn’t pay to go to university. I had the freedom to experiment and it seems to me that is being slowly eradicated. It is our job in this room to keep these doors open for people who don’t have all those chances.”
“As winner of both the Turner prize and an Academy Award, Steve is pre-eminent in the world of film and the moving image. He is one of the most influential and important British artists of the past 25 years and his work, both short and long form, has consistently explored the endurance of humanity – even when it is confronted by inhumane cruelty – with a poetry and visual style that he has made his own,” said Josh Berger, chairman of the BFI. “We are thrilled that Steve has become a BFI fellow.”
Before striking Oscar gold in 2014, McQueen, 47, stepped nimbly between the world of art to the world of film with his acclaimed 2008 first feature Hunger. Starring Fassbender as hunger striker Bobby Sands, it won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes film festival and many other international prizes.
McQueen’s biggest hit, 12 Years A Slave, was adapted from the memoir of Solomon Northup, a former black slave from New York state, and was released in 2013, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt and, once again, Fassbender. The director is currently working on heist thriller Widows, with a screenplay written by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. It is based on Lynda La Plante’s 1980s TV series.
During his career as a groundbreaking contemporary artist, McQueen often worked in film and video and was awarded an Institute of Contemporary Arts Futures award in 1996 in recognition of his promise. Shortly after, he picked up a scholarship to Berlin and exhibited at the ICA site and at the Kunsthalle in Zürich, Switzerland, before winning the coveted Turner prize with footage that paid homage to the silent film era in Hollywood.
His artwork found controversy in 2003, when he was appointed official war artist for the Iraq war by the Imperial War Museum and produced the project Queen and Country, which is still ongoing and features sheets of postage stamps bearing images of the faces of soldiers killed in action. His artwork is held in museums around the world and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, have recently mounted a solo show of his work. He was awarded the OBE in 2002 and the CBE in 2011.
Congrats to all of the winners and to the @BFI on a successful festival.
