By the time it had ended, the 2020 BFI London Film Festival announced record attendances for its latest edition, which this year combined virtual screenings with the reduced physical event that was allowed to go ahead in these times of Covid. However, the festival is not just limited to London these days and the total attendance was 315,000 across the UK and internationally, compared with 2019 when 178,000 had attended London screenings, with the festival reaching a total 190,000, including screenings across the UK.
The 2020 festival presented 60 films, 54 of which were screened via The British Film Institute’s online player that showed the films digitally. Six films played exclusively in cinemas with physically distanced screenings and BFI’s Central London Southbank Cinema was joined by 12 festival partners in London and regionally, including The Glasgow Film Theatre, Home in Manchester and Watershed in Bristol. Eleven of the films offered virtually also played in cinemas, making the opportunity to see 17 physical festival screenings in total. Steve McQueen’s opening-night film Mangrove was offered free to audiences across the 13 main festival cinemas.
This year’s LFF admissions total was boosted in a large part by the events programme (digital for the first time) as it was free to viewers and not geo-blocked, so this inevitably helped the total number increase to 174,000 from the physical as well as virtual screenings. Most popular were the Screen Talk events with Tsai Ming-liang and Riz Ahmed, as well as the Female Horror panel.
Despite being a mainly remote event, there were still the usual festival sections with their simple and playful names: Laugh, Dare, Journey, Create, Love, Cult, Debate, Family and Treasures (from the archive), alongside Short Films. In addition, Experimenta (interactive and with a new virtual reality strand, the new XR programme) and LFF Expanded reached a total 141,000 viewings, which included press and industry screenings.
In the festival section Journey there were a total of fourteen films with the aim of the films being to take the audience to another psychogeographic place and change their perspective. In this case, a more challenging film would have been difficult to find than the Kenyan documentary I Am Samuel, directed by Pete Murimi. In a country where homosexuality is still criminalised, young Samuel meets Alex, they fall in love, but then have to contend with all the oppressions that their largely clandestine relationship faces.
Samuel was raised on a farm in rural Kenya to a typical family and grew up with the same hopes and expectations that most families have, to be happy, secure and eventually settled down to a marriage and family. His father is also a preacher at the village church. Samuel moves to the nearby Kenyan capital Nairobi, where his hidden secret comes out into the open, at least to his own self-expression. He soon meets Alex and their relationship and love begins to thrive. However, this is under the shadow of homophobic violence, and being in same sex relations is also still illegal in the eyes of Kenyan law for a century, carrying a 14-year prison sentence.
I Am Samuel is unsurprisingly muted in its appeal for any such requests for changes in the Kenyan law and otherwise lets us focus on the life of Alex and all the people he holds dear, from his loving but disapproving family to Alex and those also close to him in his brave new life in Nairobi. In the hands of director Pete Murimi it becomes a moving portrait of a gentle but tortured soul who finds himself out of synch with most of Kenyan society but quietly lives his life in a pacifist way. What is most compelling about the film is the nuanced but compelling fly on the wall approach, which clearly shows that Alex is comfortable as the subject of the director as he lets him have free rein to film his private world and the problems of balancing the pressures of family loyalty, love and a perennial plea for acceptance in an otherwise unforgiving society.
For the main prize, judges were only allowed to consider films that were available digitally, which meant several bigger films including Steve McQueen’s Mangrove and Lovers Rock were to miss out on contention for an award. Another Round, the Thomas Vinterberg directed film was chosen as best film winner of the UK’s first major film awards since the start of the pandemic. Another Round stars Mads Mikkelsen as a disillusioned teacher who together with a small group of colleagues involuntarily decides to start drinking every day. The award culminated an unusual year for the festival in hosting its first hybrid event.
Other films that were popular both in London and across the UK but not eligible for an award included the Pixar film, Soul and Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in September and stars Frances McDormand as a widow forced on to the road to find work. Likewise, Regina King’s directorial debut One Night in Miami was not considered by the judges as it was also only available for physical screenings. Another film exempt from contention, the Francis Lee directed Ammonite was the festival’s closing night film and played a total 350 UK cinemas on Saturday October 17th, with a return of nearly 14,000 admissions.