When the 68th BFI London Film Festival closed on 20 October 2024, the numbers told a story that even the most optimistic festival organisers might have hesitated to predict. Across twelve days of screenings in London and at partner venues across the UK, the festival drew 230,342 audience members – an 18 per cent increase on 2023, and a figure that eclipsed the previous record of 205,630 set in 2018. Occupancy across paid and free screenings hit 92 per cent. Nearly half of ticket bookers – 49 per cent – were attending for the first time.
These are not simply impressive statistics. They represent a cultural institution at the peak of its powers, one that has found, under festival director Kristy Matheson’s leadership, a formula that balances mainstream star power with adventurous, globally minded programming. Building on the momentum of the 67th edition, the 68th was a statement of intent: that London’s autumn film festival can compete with Venice, Telluride and Toronto not merely as a launchpad for awards season contenders, but as a destination in its own right.
A Homecoming for Steve McQueen
The festival opened on 9 October with the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s Blitz at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Starring Saoirse Ronan as an East London mother who sends her mixed-race nine-year-old son George (played by newcomer Elliott Heffernan) to the countryside for safety during the Second World War, only for the boy to jump off the train and attempt the perilous journey home, the film marks McQueen’s third time opening the LFF after Widows in 2018 and Mangrove in 2020.
McQueen – whose Small Axe series remains one of the defining works of recent British cinema – received the BFI Fellowship in 2016, and described Blitz as “such a London film” – a story not merely about a period in history but about the citizenship of the city itself. Speaking at the premiere, he said the film “honours the spirit of what and how Londoners endured during the blitz, but also explores the true representation of people in London, while at its core is the story of a working-class family desperate to be reunited during times of war.”
The film, produced by Apple Original Films alongside Working Title and New Regency, arrives at a moment when conversations about national identity, immigration and the mythologising of wartime Britain carry particular resonance. McQueen’s decision to centre the story on a child navigating casual racism, Bombsite scavengers, and the subterranean social world of Underground shelters was widely praised, even by critics who found certain subplots overly schematic. The Guardian called it “rousing”; Time Out commended its willingness to interrogate “the darker side of the Blitz” that traditional period pieces avoid. The film opens in UK cinemas on 1 November before streaming globally on Apple TV+ from 22 November.
When Animation Beat the Live-Action Contenders
The competition’s most surprising – and historic – result came on the festival’s final day. Adam Elliot’s stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail won the Best Film Award in Official Competition, becoming the first animated film to claim the top prize since the competition section was established in 2009.
The film follows separated twins Grace and Gilbert Pudel in 1970s Australia, navigating alcoholism, loneliness, grief and sexual awakening with the same darkly comic sensibility that defined Elliot’s earlier features Harvie Krumpet and Mary and Max. Voiced by Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jacki Weaver, with music by Nick Cave, it took eight years to develop and won the Cristal for Best Feature at Annecy before its London debut.
The jury, led by Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe alongside journalist Manori Ravindran and American filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green, called it “a singular achievement in filmmaking” that is “emotionally resonant and constantly surprising, Memoir tackles pertinent issues such as bullying, loneliness and grief head-on, creating a crucial and universal dialogue in a way that only animation can.” Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl – set within a Zambian community confronting sexual predation – received a special mention.
The result was a pointed reminder that animation remains undervalued in the awards ecosystem. As Elliot told Cartoon Brew: “To win best film amongst such incredible films from around the world shows that stop-motion animation is alive and well and is not a genre but a wonderful medium and vehicle to tell potent and universal stories.”
The Gala Lineup: From Almodóvar to a LEGO Pharrell
The broader programme – 255 features, shorts, series and immersive works from 80 countries, spoken in 64 languages – read like a who’s who of contemporary international cinema. Headline galas included Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora, Ali Abbasi’s provocative Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller Conclave, Jacques Audiard’s genre-defying Emilia Pérez, and Pablo Larraín’s Maria starring Angelina Jolie. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths also received prominent slots.
The festival closed on 20 October with the European premiere of Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece, an animated documentary chronicling the life of Pharrell Williams entirely through LEGO bricks. Williams and Neville were joined at the Closing Night Gala by guests from music, fashion and sport, providing a playful counterweight to the programme’s more serious offerings.
Among world premieres, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Endurance – examining Ernest Shackleton’s lost Antarctic ship – stood out alongside Steven Knight’s Victorian boxing series A Thousand Blows, starring Stephen Graham, and Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson’s Holloway, about one of Europe’s largest former women’s prisons.
Diversity by Design
The festival’s commitment to representation was woven throughout the programme rather than consigned to a sidebar. Some 112 works – 44 per cent of the total – were made by female and non-binary filmmakers. Laura Carreira’s On Falling, following a young Portuguese warehouse worker in Scotland, won the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature, making it the first British winner since Clio Barnard’s The Arbor in 2010. Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s Mother Vera, about a young Orthodox nun confronting her past, took the Grierson Award for Best Documentary. Rehab Nazzal’s Vibrations from Gaza, depicting Palestinian deaf children under siege, won the Short Film Award.
The audience, too, made its voice heard. Darren Thornton’s Irish comedy-drama Four Mothers – about a queer novelist juggling care for his elderly mother – won Best Feature, while Holloway took Best Documentary. First-time attendees accounted for nearly half of all ticket bookers, suggesting the festival’s outreach work is translating into genuine audience growth.
A Programme That Trusts Its Audience
Matheson, in her second year at the helm, has increasingly threaded avant-garde and essayistic filmmaking through the mainstream programme. Wang Bing, Payal Kapadia and Tsai Ming-liang – directors who rarely feature on festival red carpets – were given prominent placement. The LFF Expanded strand showcased twelve immersive and virtual reality projects, including Playing Kafka, an interactive adaptation of The Trial. The LFF for Free programme offered more than 60 events at BFI Southbank and gallery@oxo, including talks, DJ nights inspired by festival films, and the inaugural Film in Print strand celebrating film writing.
The festival also received £1.7 million from the UK government’s Creative Industries Sector Vision funding via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, supporting its ambition to reach broader audiences – a figure that makes the attendance record look less like a happy accident and more like the dividend of sustained investment.
What the 68th BFI London Film Festival ultimately demonstrated is that audience trust and artistic ambition are not opposing forces. The 230,342 people who attended were drawn not by a single blockbuster but by the promise of a programme that treats them as intelligent, curious viewers – capable of embracing a LEGO biopic in the same week as a Zambian psychological drama, an animated snail memoir alongside a Steve McQueen wartime epic. That is what distinguishes a great film festival from a merely successful one. London, for now, has both.
