HARRY LANGHAM takes a look at the 2022 Best British Independent Film nominees
As the British Independent Film Awards approaches its 25th birthday – a quarter of a century shining a light on all that is bold, brave and brilliant in British independent film – there is an impulse, as with all milestones, to look to the past. Since its inception in 1998, BIFA’s highest prize – the award for Best British Independent Film of the year – has passed through the hands of some of the brightest luminaries of British filmmaking, from Ken Loach – who scooped the award in its inaugural year for his tragicomic romance My Name is Joe – to Andrea Arnold, Michael Winterbottom, Mike Leigh, Danny Boyle and many more. Viewed in retrospect, the history of the Award stands as a monument to the indefinability of British independent cinema, tracing a line between such disparate titles as Billy Elliot, Slumdog Millionaire, This is England, The King’s Speech, Ex Machina, The Favourite, For Sama, Rocks and most recently, Aleem Khan’s channel-crossing debut After Love.
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And this year’s nominees are no different. Ranging from period to contemporary, from the personal to the political, experimental memoir to searing social realism, the class of 2022 embody that diversity of approach which has, for decades, characterised independent filmmaking in this country. More than this however, with two out of the five nominated films written and directed by debut filmmakers, and a further nominee authored by a debut screenwriter (not to mention the wealth of on-screen newcomers across the board), this year’s nominees remind us that in this landmark year at BIFA, as we recall past winners and nominees, we must look not only to the richness of the past, but also, to the promise of the future. For what this year’s nominated films show above all, is that the next 25 years in British independent film are in safe hands.
And so to the nominees, first amongst which is Aftersun – Charlotte Wells’ ethereal debut feature. A deeply personal meditation on memory and loss, Aftersun tells the story of divorced dad Calum and his pre-teen daughter Soph’s 90s summer holiday at an anglophone budget resort in the Turkish Mediterranean. Paul Mescal and Scottish newcomer Frankie Corio star as the father-daughter duo; their holiday seeming to pass with little drama, whilst beneath the surface, Callum struggles under the weight of post-divorce parenthood – his private struggles, viewed only in oblique glimpses, threatening to surface.
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Reaching back a decade further is Georgia Oakley’s first feature Blue Jean, which offers a piercing insight into the psychological impacts – both personal and collateral – of state homophobia, documenting the double life of a closeted lesbian PE teacher at a Tyneside state school, under the oppressive weight of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-gay Section 28 ruling. Terrified of losing her job, Jean (played by Rosy McEwen in a breakthrough role) is forced to cleave her personal and public lives in two, cloaking her sexuality from her colleagues and carefully guarding her secret relationship with girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) from public view. Punctuated by a series of archaic, fear-mongering radio broadcasts, Blue Jean summons the atmosphere of the period whilst always keeping one eye trained on the present. Just as we are reminded of how far society has come since the days of Section 28, so too do we reflect on the work still to be done.
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In a very different sense, our next nominee also centres a protagonist struggling to come to terms with their own sexuality. Debut screenwriter Katy Brand’s, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (dir. Sophie Hyde) charts the relationship between recently widowed retired teacher Nancy (Emma Thompson) and Leo (Daryl McCormack) – the young sex worker she has hired to help her ignite her long dormant, or perhaps never woken, sexual mojo. But this relationship – portioned out across four separate meetings in an upmarket hotel room – is about much more than sexual healing: Nancy’s attraction to Leo’s youth exposes her discomfort at her own advancing years; whilst Leo – on the surface, unflappable, self-assured – masks deeper issues.
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Closing out the five nominees for the Best British Independent Film Award are two period pieces, set almost a century apart, which deal in different ways with the hinterlands between life and death. Adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus) tells the story of Mr Williams (Bill Nighy) – a joyless civil servant in 1950s London, whose life is jump-started by a terminal diagnosis of stomach cancer. With just a few months to live, Mr Williams searches for a proper way to spend his dying days, finding meaning in a quiet mission to expedite the frustrated petition of a group of local mothers, seeking to build a modest playground in a local bombsite. Ultimately, it is only in death that Mr Williams learns to live.
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In Sebastián Lelio’s slow-burning thriller, The Wonder, the stories we tell around living and dying are similarly addressed. Lelio transports us to rural Ireland in the 1860s, where English nurse Lib (Florence Pugh) has been called to investigate the case of local child Anna (newcomer, Kíla Lord Cassidy) – an 11-year-old girl who hasn’t eaten for four months, but remains, miraculously, alive and well. After her strict surveillance conditions lead to a life-threatening downturn in the fasting girl’s health, Lib finds herself at the epicentre of an ideological conflict between faith and reason. With convictions on both sides tested to breaking point, the film exemplifies in the starkest of terms, that it is the stories we tell, and more importantly, the ones that we choose to believe, that make us human.
The 25th British Independent Film Awards will take place on Sunday 4 December, hosted by Ben Bailey Smith. Join us on BIFA’s Instagram for exclusive live red carpet moments and highlights.
