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After two years of change at BFI London Film Festival (Oct 8-19), director Clare Stewart has been able to focus almost solely on building a strong programme for its 58th edition with an expanded team.

“I feel squarely here now, almost proper British,” laughs the Australian, who joined from Sydney Film Festival in 2012 and immediately went about reshaping LFF.

The changes were pretty significant, shortening the festival from 16 days to 12, spreading its reach into new venues across London, grouping the programme into themed categories and introducing competition strands to raise the event’s profile and build interest.

The revamp worked and the 2012 edition recorded a 12% boost in audiences.

Last year, audiences rose again - from 149,000 to 151,000 - as restoration films and shorts were added to the themed strands, which include Love, Debate, Dare, Laugh, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Sonic, Family and Experimenta.

“That meant we got bigger and younger audiences for restorations and shorts, which is very exciting because one of the roles I take very seriously is that we are here to excite the audience of tomorrow about all cinema,” says Stewart.

The programming team, each of which see between 500 and 800 films a year, has also been given a helping hand over the past 12 months by “advisers” for each strand.

“We have been working behind the scenes on how you take a different programming approach,” says Stewart.

“As well as having our pool of international advisers, who are regional specialists in terms of international cinema, we also now have advisers who take responsibility for researching and looking in-depth at what is out there for each of the individual strands. Tim Robey is our Love tsar; Damon Wise has the Thrill section, for example. It means our net goes a lot wider.”

The result is around 250 features and 148 shorts.

Beyond the capital

Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game will open the festival. The Second World War drama, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as codebreaker Alan Turing, will be shown simultaneously at cinemas throughout the UK alongside live red-carpet footage and interviews with the film’s creators.

The decision to take the festival’s flagship films beyond London’s borders has proven popular, not just with audiences but also with distributors.

StudioCanal has 13 films at LFF, including The Imitation Game. “It’s great that we’ve got the opening night, we’re really excited about it,” says StudioCanal UK CEO Danny Perkins.

“We know the film is a crowd-pleaser so it’s great that we’re able to seed that excitement across the country and not just in London. It’s a huge platform for the film.”

Perkins also applauds the competitive element of the festival, which includes the Official Competition, the Sutherland award in the First Feature Competition and the Grierson award in the Documentary Competition.

“It’s a further opportunity to discuss the films. That’s what we need, debate around our films,” he says.

Official Competition also features The Duke Of Burgundy, the latest film from Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland, sold by Protagonist Pictures.

Strickland will also be at LFF with concert film Björk: Biophilia Live, which he co-directed with Nick Fenton and which will receive a gala premiere as the lead film of the Sonic section. He also had made a one-minute contribution to Experimenta portmanteau The Film That Buys The Cinema.

“It’s been 18 years since I last had a film at the LFF [short Bubblegum], so it’s a case of three buses in a row after such a long gap,” the Budapest-based UK director says.

“It’s a great springboard for a film’s survival, especially those that have yet to find distribution,” says Strickland of being selected by LFF.

“It’s a litmus test of sorts, which can be terrifying as you never know how an audience will react.” A further notable aspect of this year’s festival is the strong presence of women directors. A total of 53 features and 47 shorts are directed by women, including the world premiere of Carol Morley’s The Falling in Official Competition.

However, Stewart says there is more work to be done. “I can put hand on heart for both myself and Tricia Tuttle, our deputy head of festivals, and say this is a personal passion as well as a political one. But I don’t want to overstate it either. In festival terms, it’s about 20% of the overall programme. There’s still a long way to go in giving women equal footing in terms of directing bigger productions.”

Rising talent at BFI London Film Festival

Monsters: Dark Continent
Dir. Tom Green

First-time feature director Tom Green takes on the sequel to Gareth Edwards’ breakthrough sci-fi film.

Damon Wise, Thrill strand adviser at BFI London Film Festival, says: “Tom Green seems to me to have a great sense of fearlessness. He is undaunted by the scale of such an ambitious project, which he has tackled with a confidence and energy that reminds me of the young Tony Scott.”

Green previously directed two shorts and television series, including teen superhero drama Misfits, which won a Bafta for best TV series. The 34-year-old is a graduate of the National Film and Television School.

The Lost Aviator
Dir. Andrew Lancaster

Australia-based Andrew Lancaster won acclaim for his debut Accidents Happen, starring Geena Davis, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2009.

His second feature is a documentary about his infamous great uncle, the UK aviator Bill Lancaster, a celebrity in the 1920s who went on to be charged with murder.

LFF programmer Edward Lawrenson describes the film as “an absorbing blend of historical detective story and family movie”.

Talking of director Lancaster, he says: “The film delivers on the promise revealed in Accidents Happen and earlier prize-winning shorts.”

Lancaster’s third feature will be drama The Quiet, which is currently in development.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown
Dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

The feature debut of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, born in Texas on the US-Mexico border, is a genre-savvy horror that draws inspiration from the 1976 serial killer classic of the same name.

LLF programmer Michael Blyth says: “It’s a film that gives horror remakes a good name, and you can’t say that very often.”

Gomez-Rejon has directed several episodes of American Horror Story, having previously worked with co-creator Ryan Murphy directing teen musical Glee.

He has also directed second unit on award winners Argo and Babel among others. Gomez-Rejon is in post on his second feature, an adaptation of teen cancer novel Me & Earl & The Dying Girl.

Testament Of Youth
Dir. James Kent

UK TV drama director James Kent makes his first move into film with an adaptation of Vera Brittain’s beloved First World War memoir.

LFF director Clare Stewart says of Kent: “I was impressed by his ability to extract such compelling performances from emerging talent and also his effortless rendering of the film’s dramatic shift from the first flush of lyricism in the idyllic English countryside, to the stark verisimilitude of the First World War battleground.”

Kent’s TV credits include BBC mini-series The White Queen, heist drama Inside Men, supernatural drama Marchlands and TV film Margaret.

The Falling
Dir. Carol Morley

Following her breakthrough documentary Dreams Of A Life, Carol Morley returns with a 1960s-set coming-of-age drama that explores what lies behind a mysterious fainting outbreak at a rural girls’ school.

BFI deputy head of festivals Tricia Tuttle says: “The BFI has been an ardent supporter of Carol’s work from her early shorts and first doc feature, The Alcohol Years.

“The Falling is a typically bold, personal film that explores female experience and identity. I was struck again by how brilliantly she uses music and colour.

“There are echoes of Picnic At Hanging Rock, but this is uniquely English.”

The Silent Storm
Dir. Corinna McFarlane

UK writer-director Corinna McFarlane makes her fiction debut with the story of an enigmatic outsider (Andrea Riseborough) living on a remote Scottish island, who finds herself caught between her minister husband (Damian Lewis) and the delinquent who is sent to live with them.

Tuttle says: “It’s remarkable how confidently MacFarlane directs two of the world’s top actors, and she has made a real discovery in the gifted newcomer Ross Anderson.”

McFarlane’s first film was documentary Three Miles North Of Molkom. She is currently working on screwball sex comedy Monk’s Apartment.