The 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) kicks off on Wednesday, screening around 250 titles.

So, the challenge will once again be what and how to choose. If you want to explore something completely new, there are 27 world premieres, including eight features. Or you could catch up on highlights from this year’s film fest circuit, including Jim Jarmusch’s Venice winner Father Mother Sister Brother, Cannes winner It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, Noah Baumbach’s George Clooney-starring Jay Kelly, Chloé Zhao’s Shakespeare tale Hamnet, or Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.

Rian Johnson’s third star-studded Knives Out installment, Wake Up Dead Man, will open the LFF, while Julia Jackson’s 100 Nights of Hero will close the fest on Oct. 19.

Kristy Matheson, the Australian in charge of programming, had tough choices to make for her third LFF as the BFI fest’s director. She talked to THR about this year’s selection, geographic surprises, totem animals, and the importance of star power.

How and why did you choose the opening and closing films that bookend the LFF’s 2025 lineup?

They’re always such a puzzle, the opening and closing films. It really is about giving a shorthand for the flavor of the festival. And I think both of these films do that really beautifully. What they have in common is that for us, it’s really special when filmmakers play in London and then return to London. In the case of Rian Johnson, this is the third in the Knives Out series that’s coming to London. So that feels incredibly special. He somehow continues to reinvent this world so beautifully. It has two big British stars in the cast with Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor. Even though it’s an American film, it’s got a very British feel to it. And it’s great fun, it’s really engaging, just beautiful filmmaking. So it’s a really celebratory way to kick off the festival. 

With our closing film, with Julia Jackson, we have a filmmaker who we’ve had the pleasure of screening at the festival before. Her debut film, Bonus Track, played with us in 2023, so we were really excited to see her new film. It’s a film that’s very much homegrown. It also feels really wonderful to have a terrific, fun and bold queer story to close out the festival. I couldn’t be prouder of both films. 

LFF will present eight world premieres this year. Could you talk a little bit about some of them and how they fit into the broader mix of movies?

Sure. There’s Moss & Freud, which tells the story of when Lucian Freud painted Kate Moss’ portrait. It’s such an ode to London, and obviously to a huge icon of this city. But it’s also a wonderful film about what it means to be an artist,  growing into being able to use that word as an individual, and this incredibly special friendship between these two very unlike individuals. I think it’s a film that is going to really surprise people.

I’m really, really excited and proud to have The Death of Bunny Monro, our series presentation based on Nick Cave’s book. It’s adapted by the wonderful director Isabella Eklöf, who many people will know from her film work. She just turns to this series with such gusto, and there is a great performance from Matt Smith in the central role. 

We also have a film called Super Nature, which is this incredible documentary that really explores us and our relationship to the natural world, all shot on Super 8. It’s a global portrait, but it is born out of the U.K., and it’s very beautiful, very touching, and seeing it on the big screen will be quite magic. 

Have you noticed any kind of overarching themes or shared motifs that keep popping up across the lineup or any other sort of connecting tissue?

Yes, we’re all struck by how formally daring cinema is this year. There have been so many examples of filmmakers really working to sort of stretch the medium to new and interesting places. That’s really exciting. 

When we’re putting the program together, my incredible program team and I also always seem to, at certain points, find these totem animals. Last year, we had a lot of cats that were roaming around our program. It seems this year, birds are flying through so much of the program. It’s quite lovely that, as we start to pull the program together, we always return to these totem animals.

Now I am curious about a couple of examples of birds in the LFF lineup…

We have the beautiful film H Is for Hawk, which is Philippa Lowthorpe’s film [with Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson] that has a lot of incredible birds in it, for example. And Singing Wings is about the animal world and our relationship to it, but also about much bigger things. 

Will LFF audiences come across films from any unusual or particularly well-represented countries in the 2025 lineup?

We’ve got 79 different countries that the films hail from this year. There’s a lot of really impressive, strong work from the MENA (Middle East and North Africa] region and really interesting films from sub-Saharan Africa as well.

I’d say Italy is having a really terrific year in cinema. It’s not that we don’t see films from Italy regularly. But we certainly saw a lot of films, and also series, this year, which we really enjoyed. For example, we have the new series from the great Italian director Marco Bellocchio, Portobello. It’s such a great story, beautifully acted, beautifully produced, and it’s really gripping from the start. 

Also from Italy, we have Below the Clouds, the new Gianfranco Rosi film, The Kidnapping of Arabella, which is the wonderful, great sophomore film from Carolina Cavalli. So, there are a lot of different textures from Italy this year, a country that makes a lot of cinema and that’s very renowned for its cinema. But to see films and series that are quite different felt quite exciting.

You detailed in your big programming announcement that 42 percent of this year’s films are from female or non-binary filmmakers. How much do you and your team focus on that, and do you have any targets?

We are really making a conscious decision that we want the program to be very representative of the city that we’re in. For us, it’s about having the best in U.K. and international cinema to really reflect the population of London, but also to reflect the population of the world. We really do want to see stories from lots of different perspectives and are consciously trying to pull a program together that we feel is representative of who you see on the street. For us, that is important. We do want to find works that the audience attending the festival will feel like they have some connection with, or that they feel some kinship with.

Because we’re an audience-facing festival, we’re really trying to make a program that, when people open up the booklet or are scrolling through the website, they’re excited by the stories. If people can look at the program and either see themselves or see things that they know nothing about and go into them with a sense of real excitement, that’s lovely. The festival is this very intensive period where you get to meet a lot of different people and a lot of different stories. And I don’t think you come out the same way you went in. You have some different ideas, you have some new obsessions. I’m not saying you radically change, but I think you come out with some new tips and tricks in your backpack. 

How important is star power for you and your team programming the LFF?

You’re now getting these films with just an incredible array of stars. Look at Wake Up Dead Man. What’s so joyful about that film is seeing a true ensemble cast, and it’s such a wonderful ensemble cast. There was a time when big ensemble casts weren’t so common in films. Even a film like Jay Kelly – the cast is not as large, but again, it’s a real ensemble piece with very, very big-name actors [in George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough]. 

What’s been wonderful in watching the films over these last months was just seeing a lot of people playing against what their perceived type is. Everyone saw The Whale and thought it was that very big turning point for Brendan Fraser. But then to see him in a film like Hakari’s Rental Family, it’s a very different kind of performance, a very touching performance, and perhaps a role which, maybe in another life, wouldn’t be played by such a quote, unquote famous actor.

I also think Mona Fastvold’s film The Testament of Ann Lee is similar. You got Amanda Seyfried in that lead role, and it’s such an incredible performance. And obviously, we know that she’s a wonderful singer and all, but again, you could have potentially cast an unknown for that role just as easily. I think it’s maybe also speaking to the fact that you have these incredible talents who want to work with great directors and on interesting films. 

Is there anything else you feel is important to highlight heading into LFF 2025?

There’s one thing that I really, really want to see but haven’t yet is this really amazing, huge immersive experience in our LFF Expanded section. We have an immersive special presentation called NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars). You walk into a room with over 4,000 reactive LED lights, and you are essentially in the cosmos. I can’t wait. I think it’s a really ambitious project that we’re really excited to experience.