Un-reel city, under the brown fog of winter (well, autumn) dawn – a crowd flowed over Picadilly Circus, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Apologies to T.S. Eliot, but London Film Festival 2023 has landed – banging the slush from its shoes, clapping its hands together, and inviting us to step inside the cheugy rooms of Picturehouse bloody Central for two weeks of untapped film. For the first of our festival reports (there’ll be three), we got to grips with some biggies and some smallies: Kore-eda's MONSTER, Breillat’s long-awaited latest, LAST SUMMER, the Camera d’or winning INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL, and a slurry of BFI-funded short films of [muffled cursing] dubious quality, alongside Coppola’s PRISCILLA. Oh, and we filmed the whole thing, just in case you want to see the whites of our eyes. 0:00 Intro 3:59 Last Summer - Catherine Breillat 16:17 British short films and why they’re bad 37:53 Haar - Ben Hecking 50:00 Monster - Hirokazu Kore-eda 1.07:40 Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell - Pham Thien-An 1:25:17 Outro

Watch at:

https://youtu.be/420bIpL7UdM?si=lJ235_IDbgA2Vxkp