As part of Screen International’s guide to the films to watch this awards season, we round up some of the key indie contenders from the UK.
Back To Black
Dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson
Amy Winehouse’s impactful life – already celebrated in Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning documentary Amy – powers Studiocanal’s box-office hit ($51m worldwide). Marisa Abela leads the awards charge as the iconic singer, while the supporting cast includes Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan and Lesley Manville. Taylor-Johnson has previous success in the genre with her quadruple-Bafta-nominated 2010 debut Nowhere Boy and reunites with screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh for Back To Black.
Bird
Dir. Andrea Arnold
Arnold won Baftas for her first two featuresRed Road and Fish Tank, going on to earn nominations for American Honey and Cow – and also has two British Independent Film Awards (Bifa) wins. She will hope to keep the momentum going with this Cannes-launched drama about a 12-year-old girl (Nykiya Adams) living in a graffiti-covered apartment with her elder brother (Jason Buda) and unreliable father (Barry Keoghan) in southeast England, who encounters titular drifter Bird (Franz Rogowski).
Blitz
Dir. Steve McQueen
The UK filmmaker returns to the awards conversation a decade after 12 Years A Slave took home the top prize at both the Oscars and Baftas, and six years after Widows netted a best actress Bafta nomination for Viola Davis. As Apple’s biggest awards contender, the London-set Second World War tale will likely pull more weight at home than stateside. Four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan could flourish in supporting actress, and below-the-line categories could feature. Blitz opened the BFI London Film Festival in October ahead of an awards-qualifying run from November 1.
Bring Them Down
Dir. Chris Andrews
This long-in-development first feature from shorts director Andrews launched at this year’s Toronto, and stars Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Colm Meaney, Paul Ready and Nora-Jane Noone as two neighbouring sheep farming families, caught up in a violent conflict fuelled by stubbornness, resentment and a tangled history. Bifa, where the film has 11 longlist inclusions, plus Bafta’s fully juried outstanding British debut category, offer the best chance of prizes.
Civil War
Dir. Alex Garland
Qualified as British by Bifa (where the film has 13 longlist inclusions), and produced by DNA’s Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich, this latest from Garland (who was Oscar- and Bafta-nominated for 2015’s Ex Machina) is a UK film with a US feel. Set in the aftermath of a second US civil war, reporters Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson and photographers Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst travel through hostile territory from New York to Washington DC, hoping for an audience with Nick Offerman’s authoritarian US president, holed up in the White House. This A24 action thriller/road movie was a clarion cry for the importance of a free press and yielded $124m global box office.
Hard Truths
Dir. Mike Leigh
This Toronto-launched feature, Leigh’s first with an almost entirely Black cast, sees the UK filmmaker reunite with Secrets & Lies’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste, as a London wife and mother whose evident depression flares into antipathy towards everyone she encounters. Likely Bifa nominations for Jean-Baptiste and co-star Michele Austin (who had smaller roles in three previous Leigh films) could give momentum to the Bafta campaign. Leigh has seven Oscar nods (for writing or directing) and has won three competitive Baftas and two special awards.
Hoard
Dir. Luna Carmoon
Having made its debut in Venice Critics’ Week in 2023, where it won three prizes including the audience award, Carmoon’s debut embarked on a successful festival run before opening in the UK in May through Vertigo. Hoard, about a teenage woman reassessing the childhood she spent with her hoarder mother, is widely regarded as one of the best UK debuts of the year – and a strong performance at the Bifas (where it has 14 longlist inclusions) could set it up for more.
Joy
Dir. Ben Taylor
Originally in development at Pathé (Cameron McCracken remains an executive producer), before being given a home by Netflix, this biographical drama centres the three medical trailblazers (James Norton, Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie) who successfully pioneered fertility treatment at a Greater Manchester hospital in the 1970s. TV director Taylor (a Bafta nominee for Cardinal Burns) makes his feature debut on the project, from co-creators Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason.
Lee
Dir. Ellen Kuras
Boasting a star turn by Kate Winslet as celebrated US model-turned-war photographer Lee Miller, Kuras’s biopic has been rolling out theatrically since late September, and has grossed an impressive $5.6m (£4.3m) at the UK and Ireland box office. Winslet has garnered praise for a performance that could secure her eighth Oscar and ninth Bafta film nomination (she has won one and three respectively). Kuras, a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker, was Oscar-nominated in 2009 for her non-fiction featureThe Betrayal (Nerakhoon).
Love Lies Bleeding
Dir. Rose Glass
Glass’s follow-up to her unsettling debut feature Saint Maud is equally audacious: a neo-noir starring Kristen Stewart as a gym manager who falls for Katy O’Brian’s body builder, passing through town on the way to Las Vegas. The pair embark on a passionate affair that results in mayhem and murder. Bifa voters should support the film across multiple categories, perhaps including Ed Harris as Stewart’s trigger-happy gunrunner father – and the film has 16 longlist inclusions.
On Becoming A Guinea Fowl
Dir. Rungano Nyoni
Zambia-born Nyoni follows up her 2017 debut I Am Not A Witch – which won the Bafta for outstanding British debut and three Bifas including best director – with this story of a Zambian woman struggling with long-held family secrets. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl could achieve further awards success having already won best director in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and the Golden Eye at Zurich. Picturehouse Entertainment releases in the UK on December 6.
The Outrun
Dir. Nora Fingscheidt
Bafta and Bifa voters may wish to recognise Saoirse Ronan for her raw portrayal of a recovering alcoholic in Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir, which Ronan produced in tandem with actor husband Jack Lowden, Sarah Brocklehurst and Dominic Norris. After opening the revamped Edinburgh International Film Festival in August, the Studiocanal drama grossed more than $2.7m (£2.1m) in the UK and Ireland, with Sony Pictures Classics reaching $824,000 in the US at press time.
Santosh
Dir. Sandhya Suri
The UK’s entry for the best international feature Oscar follows a newly widowed woman who inherits her husband’s job as a police officer in rural northern India and is taken under the wing of a feminist police inspector. The Hindi-language fiction feature debut of British-Indian filmmaker Suri, who was Bafta-nominated for her 2018 short The Field, Santosh debuted in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard before embarking on a healthy festival run.
We Live In Time
Dir. John Crowley
This romantic drama took its bow in Toronto, then segued to San Sebastian and the BFI London Film Festival ahead of a release in the US via A24 (grossing $11.8m to date) – with Studiocanal distributing in several territories. Stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh are no strangers to awards buzz, with three Oscar and five Bafta film nominations between them. They join forces with Brooklyn director Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne in a decade-long look at a couple’s relationship. Crowley and Garfield both won TV Baftas in 2008 with their first collaboration, drama Boy A.
Wilding
Dir. David Allen
Wilding is the highest-grossing documentary of 2024 at the UK and Ireland box office, by a country mile, with nearly $800,000 (£612,000) to date for distributor MetFilm. Debut director Allen adapts Isabella Tree’s bestselling 2018 book about how she and husband Charlie Burrell set about rewilding their West Sussex farmland estate, Knepp – revitalising its degenerated soil, and restoring a rich biodiversity over a period of two decades.
Awards contender profiles by Nikki Baughan, Ellie Calnan, Charles Gant, Mark Salisbury, Neil Smith.
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