Our picks for this year’s London Film Festival

This year’s festival, featuring highlights from a number of major directors, also includes debuts from Muslim talent from the UK and beyond

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Actors Amrit Kaur and Hamza Haq star in the Canadian comedic drama The Queen of My Dreams. Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Amrit Kaur and Hamza Haq in The Queen of My Dreams. Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

The BFI London Film Festival returns for its 67th season from 4-15 October. The festival will showcase nearly 170 feature films, including 14 premieres. Highly anticipated films include British actor Daniel Kaluuya’s directorial debut feature, The Kitchen, and Poor Things, a sci-fi thriller starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef, which was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 80th Venice International Film Festival last month.

Industry speakers will also be in town to talk about their craft, including Barbie director Greta Gerwig and Oscar-winner Martin Scorsese, who returns to the LFF with Killers of the Flower Moon. 

This year’s programme also boasts no shortage of Muslim talent. Here are our picks from this year’s lineup. 

The Queen of My Dreams, Fawzia Mirza

The Queen of My Dreams is a Canadian comedy directed by actor and director Fawzia Mirza, dubbed a “White House Champion of Change” in 2016 for her contributions to diverse representation in the media. Queen of My Dreams is her first full-length feature, and centres around Azra, a gay teenager who has a strained relationship with her parents. The film is a welcome contribution to the coming-out genre of filmmaking. 

Faraz Ayub in Sky Peals. Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Faraz Ayub in Sky Peals. Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

Sky Peals, Moin Hussain

Written and directed by British-Pakistani newcomer Moin Hussain, the science fiction film Sky Peals tells a story of mixed heritage; monotonous jobs and encounters with extraterrestrial life. The film also adds coming-of-age themes to reveal a story of present-day alienation. Sky Peals premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is one to watch for anyone interested in challenging contemporary cinema.

Left to right: Um Ali (Abbass’ grandmother), actress Hiam Abbass, Lina Soualem (Abbass’ daughter). Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Left to right: Um Ali (Abbass’ grandmother), actress Hiam Abbass, Lina Soualem (Abbass’ daughter). Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival


Bye Bye Tiberias, Lina Soualem

Bye Bye Tiberias is a documentary like no other. Director Lina Soualem is both the creator, and the subject — or rather, the subject’s daughter. The film follows acclaimed French-Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass (Succession, Ramy) as she returns to her ancestral home in Palestine, which she left decades ago to pursue a career in acting in France. Ambitious in its storytelling, the director asks her mother to re-enact important conversations in her life for the screen, and the result is an excavation of memory and suppressed emotions about what it means to leave a homeland. This is an intimate portrait about four generations of women with differing experiences of exile.

Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
A still from the documentary, Celluloid Underground. Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

Celluloid Underground, Ehsan Khoshbakht

Celluloid Underground is testament to Iran’s flourishing film industry which has produced the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi. Part-memoir, part-collage, the documentary focuses on the post-revolution era, depicting how one movie collector, Ahmad Jorghanian, hid and distributed thousands of films to prevent their destruction by the regime. Despite facing arrest and torture, Ahmed continues his operations. Celluloid Underground is narrated by his friend and filmmaker Ehsan, who remembers him in exile from London. 

Siran Riak in Goodbye Julia. Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Siran Riak in Goodbye Julia. Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

Goodbye Julia, Mohamed Kordofani

A fictional drama set in Khartoum in the runup to the formation of South Sudan after an independence vote in 2011, Goodbye Julia tells the story of two women. Mona, a petty bourgeois singer from the nation’s bustling capital, employs Julia, the widow of the South Sudanese man whose death she caused, as her maid. The film is a tale of class, guilt and resentment, and the first Sudanese film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ben Hardy (left) and Jason Patel in Unicorns. Photographs courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Ben Hardy (left) and Jason Patel in Unicorns. Photograph courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

Unicorns, Sally El-Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd

Complicated relationships with mothers, double lives and inter-racial love: Unicorns is a romantic queer drama which tackles all three of these themes. Starring Ben Hardy and Jason Patel, the film follows Aysha, who is a drag queen making ends meet in London. By night, she performs, but in the day she lives a parallel life as a closeted, unassuming man living with his traditional mother. Aysha is forced to rethink her identity after she meets Luke, a single father and mechanic, who sparks her journey of self-discovery.

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