The director of this year’s London Film Festival closing movie hailed the event as “crucial part of cinema culture.”
Francis Lee’s Ammonite – a biopic starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, about the life of British palaeontologist Mary Anning – was today announced as the closing film of the 64th BFI London Film Festival.
It will have its UK premiere on October 17, the last day of the festival, which begins on October 7 with a screening of Steve McQueen’s Mangrove .
Over the two weeks, a number of anticipated films will be screened digitally and in venues across the country in one of the UK’s biggest annual celebrations of cinema.
Speaking to the Standard, Lee – known for his breakthrough 2017 film God’s Own Country – hailed the festival as “crucial” for discovering new film talent.
He said: “The BFI London Film Festival is a crucial part of our cinema culture, often bringing smaller, independent films to audiences where we can discover new talent from around the world, that may not get theatrical distribution in the UK. Also at a time when cinemas have been closed for a long time, it’s a wonderful opportunity to watch films on a large screen, where most of them where intended to play.”
Lee, who won a Sundance Film Festival award for God’s Own Country, said it was an “incredible honour” for his film to be closing the festival.
The director said he wanted to tell Anning’s story as he is: “in equal measures obsessed by class, landscape, gender and deep, human relationships. I found the character of Mary Anning compelling – a working class woman, born into poverty with little formal education, without evidence of any romantic or intimate relationship with a man, who rose to being one of the leading figures in her scientific field, but due to the strict patriarchal, class-ridden society, was never recognised for her work.”
The director added: “I think Ammonite is a story about the power of love, the power of a deep, intimate, human relationship; the power of touch; and of hope, and at this particular time when many of us have been physically isolated and lonely, I hope people might find some pleasure and resonance in this story.”
