Next in our series of posts on Leeds International Film Festival, Hannah tells us about her festival plans…

Last week, on a bit of a nostalgia trip, I watched the French film A Town Called Panic (2009) This showed on bonfire night at the Picture House during LIFF24 in 2010 and was my first taste of the film festival. Since then, my festival has steadily grown from the occasional odd film when I happened to be in Leeds to being an essential fortnight of my autumn calendar, around which all other things must be carefully arranged.

This year I’m going full tilt into LIFF (can we call it LIFF33?). After 2018, I said I’d take it easy and have time to reflect between screenings, maybe pop home occasionally, check in with my family or go for some leisurely lunches. You know, the things it’s nice to do when you’ve taken a week off work. Unfortunately somewhere in the planning, that idea has been bulldozered. The changes in ticketing for the festival, a jam-packed programme to choose from and a kind of film festival FOMO have conspired to keep me as square-eyed as ever.

At the time of writing, I’m lining up 45 screenings across the 16 days of festival; from Hollywood yet-to-be-blockbusters like Jojo Rabbit and Little Monsters, French animation (I Lost My Body), and East Asian action (The Gangster The Cop The Devil, The Wild Goose Lake) to documentaries like The Hidden City, shorts (ALL the animation) and a smattering of classics (All About Eve, Bonnie and Clyde). It’s going to be an effort, but when the line-up is this varied and exciting, I want to make the most I can of the opportunity.

The Picture House has been the scene of some of my favourite LIFF memories and this year has some exciting offerings:

• The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty – A 1926 silent found-footage film marking the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution with live piano accompaniment.
• The Hidden City – a documentary by Víctor Moreno on subterranean worlds; the pipes, tunnels and transport beneath our cities.
• Night of the Dead and the inaugural Sci-fi Day – the marathon events at HP are staples of the film festival programme and this year the line-up includes a sci-fi run back to back with NOTD. If you’re really going for it you could attempt both, and I’m sure some will!

Outside the Picture House, I’m really looking forward to:

• The Gangster The Cop The Devil – Thanks to LIFF, I’ve discovered a love of Korean action. A gangster and a police officer hunt a serial killer – the trailer is promising and I have high hopes.
• Come to Daddy – Elijah Wood in a grizzly family drama. It might tip into type-casting, but Wood does wide-eyed terror well and I expect it to be put to good use here.
• Days of the Bagnold Summer – the directorial debut from Simon Bird (Will from The Inbetweeners) is an adaptation from the graphic novel of the same name by Joff Winterhart. A story of a teenage boy and his mum navigating a long summer holiday together. The cast includes British favourites Alice Lowe, Monica Dolan and Tamsin Greig, with Earl Cave (Nick’s son) in the central role.
• Family Romance LLC – A Werner Herzog documentary exploring a business in Japan that rents out actors to substitute in others’ lives, like a nonfiction rendering of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2011 film Alps. That film was strange enough and I’m interested to see how the real version might work. From the trailer and bits I’ve read online, it’s going to be an odd one.

With a programme that offers such a variety and by giving myself the freedom to take some risks, the LIFF experience to date has dramatically expanded my cinematic horizons. Before discovering them in the cinema, I probably would have skirted all sorts of excellent foreign-language films because they felt like too much of a challenge and I definitely wouldn’t have gone out to see many documentaries on the big screen. These days the reluctance has vanished and recent years have been a feast of the weird and wonderful.

Taking an afternoon off work to go to the cinema feels like a decadent treat, something you can file under ‘self care’ and spoil yourself rotten at a matinee. Take a whole day off to go to the pictures and it might start to feel strange – more than one film at this time of year and you’ll barely see daylight. Take a few more and step out of your day-to-day life, disconnect from rolling news and immerse yourself in the moving image. There in the dark, you might learn something new, experience something you wouldn’t have otherwise, and lose yourself in other people’s imaginations. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.

LIFF 2019 starts on Wednesday. I’ll see you in the cinema!