WatchSeeLookView At The LFF 2020 - Closing Thoughts

The festival this year was, of course, a vast departure from what it would have been in the absence of a global pandemic so first things first -  the BFI did an incredible job of pulling together the nearest equivalent to the festival we all know and love in order to give us something to get us through stay-at-home life. It genuinely was as close as they could get to creating the same sort of buzz that the real in-person event has and hats off to them for managing to get an online equivalent up and running. The use of specific start times worked well, giving you that agony of choice over which films to pick that is part and parcel of the festival experience. Here are few specific thoughts…

Documentary and Drama

For me, the strands that I tend to gravitate towards the most are the Comedy and Cult strands (yes, I know, no surprises there). This year, there was a limited number of films on offer in those areas so I was pushed more into choices that I might not have made otherwise. This prompted me towards more from the drama and documentary strands that I might normally have picked and made me pick a few films that I might not have otherwise watched (which would have been a shame given that I thoroughly enjoyed them) - The Reason I Jump, The Painter And The Thief and New Order being among those. The downside to this was that, after a long string of hard hitting dramas and documentaries, I was beginning to feel pretty drained and wrung out by the end of the fest.

Home Cinema

There were definite plusses and minuses to having the films at your fingertips instead of having to schlep across London. I could fit in some back to back screenings that wouldn't have been possible in the outside world version and, with some films having a three day window to start watching them rather than having to watch within two hours of the screening start time, I could work out a schedule that fitted in around work much more easily. The missing thing though is that shared communal experience of being amongst fellow film lovers who are really into it and also (a big draw for me) the interviews and Q&As with the filmmakers and casts. There were online Q&As but, to be honest after watching a couple, these didn't really work for me (just personal taste).

Quality

One thing that hadn’t altered is the quality of the films on offer. Out of the 27 films that I watched, there were only around 3 to 4 that I didn't really enjoy. I enjoyed the rest to varying degrees but there was some level of enjoyment there. It’s a testament to the BFI programmers that were still able to pull together a strong programme of films in a year when maybe a sixth of the number of films were on offer.

Would I do it virtually again? My preference naturally would be to be able to go and see these in a real live cinema, enjoyable as the home-based version was. If it comes to it, though, I’ll happily take the online version again. After all, the show must go on.