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The 69th BFI London Film Festival is set to join us once again this October. Festival director, Kristy Matheson, has curated a programme which highlights this year’s themes surrounding family, love, and belonging.

Ann Marie Fleming’s film opens with documentary footage of a burning forest. The harrowing scene is not followed by such violence; instead, chased by golden sunlit shots of a planet healing.

Sorda (2025) is a Spanish drama directed by Eva Libertad about a woman named Ángela (Miriam Garlo) who is deaf and leads her life in Spain’s countryside with her partner, Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes). She experiences the new onset of pregnancy and the following stages of early motherhood, whilst facing the frustrations and difficulties which arise within a hearing-normative world. 

‘Happyend’ (Neo Sora, 2024); Image courtesy of Modern Films  Neo Sora’s feature film Happyend was one that I had anticipated with...

Stéphane Ly-Cuong, Clotilde Chevalier, and Phuong Le at the London screening of Dans la Cuisine des Nguyen (Stéphane Ly-Cuong, 2025);...

Plainclothes (2025), the feature debut of Carmen Emmi, is a gritty depiction of a closeted gay police officer’s inner conflict, where his day job enforcing the law conflicts with his queerness.

A murder mystery set in the affluent town of Grosse Pointe, the show follows four characters trying to win the championship for the best garden in the city.

Dans la Cuisine des Nguyen, or In the Nguyen Kitchen, is French director Stéphane Ly-Cuong’s incredible first film which discusses themes of identity, rootlessness and belonging.

Photo by MTSOfan via Flickr  (licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ) Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is an amalgamation of our innermost anxieties...

In recent years, being a DC fan meant not getting my hopes up for the comics being adapted into films. So when James Gunn announced he would be directing a new Superman movie, I approached it with skepticism.