In the days and weeks leading up to this year's Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF) I was more concerned about falling ill (Covid or otherwise) than anything else. I had booked the time off work and my hopes for the festival were more modest than usual. The festival was moved to a VOD online player with a more limited programme in 2020 due to the government announcing another national lockdown a day before the festival started. Given the pre-vaccine situation at the time I wasn't planning on going to live screenings anyway and like with many other things last year had resigned myself to missing out.
There was a bad omen for this year's festival when it was announced on Facebook ahead of the preview event that the opening film would be Pablo Larrain's Spencer with Kristen Stewart. Great, more royalist propaganda for UK audiences. Needless to say it had me fearing the worst for the rest of the lineup of this year's event. To make matters worse, the programme launch on 13th October gave people in attendance a series of mediocre trailers. Trailers seem to be a dying artform these days and the ones that were shown certainly didn't do the featured films any favours.
When I examined the contents of the programme given out at the preview event I was pleasantly surprised. Not a vintage year perhaps but it gave me plenty to deliberate over. After being denied a showing of Parasite at the 2019 festival, the inclusion this time of Titane bought back the LIFF tradition of featuring the Palme d'Or winner of the current year's Cannes Film Festival. Takashi Miike is a LIFF regular and this year we got The Great Yokai War: Guardians; a belated sequel to a film he made in 2005 which I haven't seen, but it worked perfectly well as a standalone offering. Other major filmmakers represented in the lineup included Jane Campion, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Paul Schrader, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Paolo Sorrentino, Jacques Audiard, Joanna Hogg, Celine Sciamma and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
I was unaware of a recent Japanese remake of the 1997 Canadian sci-fi/Horror flick Cube until I saw the programme. Although it got my curiousity, from what I gather it sticks closely to the original concept and story and early reviews of the film were hardly glowing. Perhaps it's a belated response to the vogue for Western remakes of Asian Horror films in the 2000s. Classic Horror was represented by showings of James Whale's The Old Dark House and Robert Wise's The Haunting, both chosen to launch a new subset in the 'Fanomenon' programme highlighting how the Horror genre has explored gender and sexuality. In terms of themed selections this may have been the best year yet for me. 'BFI Japan' was part of a nationwide programme that delves in to classic Japanese cinema and showcased masterworks like Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Funeral Parade of Roses. To mark the centenary of the birth of Polish Science Fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, several adaptations of his work were shown including Pilot Pirx's Inquest, Andrzej Wadja's Roly Poly, the Quay Brothers' animated short film Maska and Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 classic Solaris. The selection of "Kafkaesque Cinema" was an inspired addition, The Shop on Main Street, The Witness, Xala and Invasion helped illustrate how the films that have come closest to capturing the essence of his work haven't always been direct adaptations.
First and foremost on my wishlist for this year's programme were Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta and Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Earwig, both of which had been at the London Film Festival in October but we weren't so lucky in Leeds. Hong Sang-soo has had two new films shown at international festivals this year - Introduction and In Front of Your Face - and I had hoped that at least one of them would be featured here but sadly neither were to be found at this year's lineup in Leeds. I had seen In Another Country and Claire's Camera at the festival in prior years so the inclusion of at least one of his most recent works didn't feel like too much of a longshot. Hong's films remain frustratingly difficult to see in the UK and the best chance to catch them is either at a film festival or via a release on mubi.com, as happened with last year's The Woman Who Ran.
This year the Town Hall was not used as a venue due to ongoing renovation work so the VUE at the Light in the city centre was the primary location for screenings. For a couple of weeks it was almost like a second home to me. I would have liked to have got to a showing at Cottage Road cinema in Headingley. It's the closest cinema to where I live and the only one in Leeds that is in walking distance for me. I've not been there since 2019 and would like to get there again soon. My choice of viewing though was based almost exclusively at the VUE. The one exception was the Howard Assembly Room where I saw The Parallel Street.
It was a much scaled down selection compared to previous years. I chose to get the LIFF Explorer Pass for £50, which allows access to six films plus a discount ticket price of £5 for each subsequent title chosen.
This year was the first time that I can recall not choosing to see an animated title, although Fortune Favours Lady Nikkuko, Summer Ghost and Sing a Bit of Harmony were all considered. While The Souvenir Part II is already one of the year's most acclaimed films and looks set to be a prime contender in end-of-year polls I had no interest in seeing a followup to one of the most tedious, vacuous and overrated films in recent memory. Likewise Petite Maman has received rave reviews but having thoroughly despised Portrait of a Lady on Fire at LIFF 2019 I chose to avoid the directors followup effort. I also skipped two films that I was interested in seeing (The Power of the Dog and The Hand of God) as both will be available on Netflix in December.
Here's a list of the titles that I've watched.
As it transpired the first film that I saw (The Card Counter) was, in my opinion, the best and the final film I caught (Titane) was by far the worst. Everything in between was more than worthwhile. Although I very much liked Memoria I may come to regret watching it. I do struggle to get through films that have later start times, in this case 8.15pm, as my body clock is so used to being up bright and early for work the next day and on this occasion I was getting very drowsy in the final half hour or so of the film. As it was the only showing of the film it meant that I had to miss a rare screening of King Vidor's 1928 silent classic The Crowd, which started 45 minutes earlier. It's a film I've wanted to see for many years but remains difficult to get hold of in the U.K. I also chose to watch Titane, knowing that it would likely prevent me from getting to an early evening showing of a 35mm archive print of The Man Who Stole the Sun at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. It's highly regarded by Japanese critics but has rarely been shown internationally since it came out in 1979. Given its prize winning status and Body Horror/Cronenbergian concept I felt more compelled to see Titane, which in hindsight was perhaps a bad idea.
Missing out on the film festival last year was one of the many frustrations and unfortunate sacrifices that I and innumerable others had to endure in 2020. I seem to have got back in to the cinemagoing habit more quickly than I thought I would. Perhaps the longer than usual break from these things has made me appreciate them more. It's surprising how many different factors make up the overall experience of the film festival. From the early anticipation, the preview event, right and wrong predictions about what will be on the programme, titles featured that have carried over from other film festivals around the world, the time clashes, the tough decisions over what to watch and what to miss, the disappointments, the highlights, the errors and the regrets are somehow all part of the fun. This year I perhaps realised for the first time how lucky I am to have such an event so close to where I live.
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