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Film: London Film Festival preview

by
04 October 2024

Stephen Brown on the London Film Festival

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave

THE BFI London Film Festival (9-20 October) once again offers several movies with a religious flavour, some also screening regionally.

In Conclave (Cert. 12A), Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) assembles his peers to elect the next Pope. Plots and counterplots, like a Dan Brown page-turner, ensue, but, as it is based on Robert Harris’s novel, with, I hope, a more trenchant view of things.

The director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) also adds gravitas to the enterprise as does Peter Straughan, screenwriter for John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Conclave promises not just intrigue, but a pondering of the eternal mysteries of faith. I wonder how this new pontiff movie compares with We Have a Pope (Arts, 2 December 2011), The Two Popes (Arts, 29 November 2019), and the Jude Law-John Malkovich series.

The documentary Mother Vera features an Orthodox nun seeking sanctuary at a Belarusian monastery. Now far from a troubled past, she faces her fears. The filmmakers Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson chronicle the renewed spiritual journey.

Richard Curtis’s script for That Christmas (Cert. PG) clearly intends to remind viewers Jesus is the reason for the season. As in his series The Vicar of Dibley, Christianity is explored with much affectionate humour. Three Suffolk families experience obstacles to their festivities by way of blizzards, overworked parents, and Scrooge-like teachers. Not even Santa can remedy the situation. It needs a miracle. This Netflix-produced animated tale is directed by Simon Otto.

A still from Witches

Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches concerns itself with post-natal depression and psychosis, using images of witches from feature films to illustrate how patriarchy, religion, and superstition contrive to degrade and curtail female aspirations to break free of being falsely categorised. It examines the stigma attached to mental illness, and how society deals with mental health. From the look of it, though, this isn’t an essay of unrelieved gloom.

In Shambhala, Pema, a young Nepalese woman, tries to find her missing husband. The brother-in-law, a Buddhist monk, joins the search. It becomes a journey full of deeply spiritual self-reflection.

Memoir of a Snail, a stop-motion feature from the Oscar-winning Adam Elliot, director of Mary and Max, features twins, separated in 1970s Australia. Raised respectively by swingers and religious fundamentalists, it examines how they have been equally oppressed by libertinism and narrow-mindedness.

Abiding Nowhere is Tsai Ming-liang’s latest film in his Walker series. Kang-sheng Lee replicates the pilgrimage of Xuanzang, a seventh-century Buddhist monk. It is set against shots of Washington, DC, the purpose being to endorse the need to attend, via silence and meditation, to our existence. A film without dialogue, it transcends arbitrary divisions of nations and languages.

A still from Seed of the Sacred Fig

In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Iman (Missagh Zareh) is a pious, upright Tehran judge struggling with handling national protests. This is a classic example of living according to one’s lights and yet colluding with systems that ultimately contradict the very beliefs by which one is guided. Meanwhile, women find ways of subverting oppression.

The Apprentice Cert. 12A) has been described as a Faustian bargain, but which version? A young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is tutored by a Mephistopheles-like lawyer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), playing on people’s darkest fears in exchange for power. Does Trump gain the whole world, but lose his soul — or not?

Various venues. Box office: phone 020 7928 3232. whatson.bfi.org.uk

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