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London Film Festival: Sex trafficking drama 'Joy' named best film in competition

Jury president Lenny Abrahamson called the film 'a provocative and unique film'

Saturday 20 October 2018 19:04 BST

'Joy', directed by Sudabeh Mortezai

Joy, a drama that tackles the vicious cycle of sex trafficking in modern Europe, has been named this year's best film in competition at the BFI London Film Festival.

Directed by Sudabeh Mortezai, the story follows a young Nigerian woman who must work the streets to pay off debts to an exploiter, all while supporting a family in Nigeria.

Jury president and Room director Lenny Abrahamson called the film “a provocative and unique film offering a devastating portrait of human resilience in the most inhuman of environments.”

The official competition jury also gave a special commendation to Birds Of Passage, directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra.

Girl, directed by Lukas Dhont, won the Sutherland award in the first feature competition. The film has been selected as the Belgian entry for the best foreign language film at the Oscars and tells the story of a transgender teenager who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Show all 17

1/17The best films of 2018 (so far)

The best films of 2018 (so far)

The Guardians

From its slow-burning beginning, The Guardians develops into an epic melodrama. It’s a wartime story in which, for a change, the men are relegated to supporting roles. It follows in a tradition of French rural family sagas like Jean De Florette or Manon Des Sources. The landscapes and the changing seasons play as much of a part in the story as the main characters.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Dark River

Dark River offers little such consolation. It has some lyrical and delicate moments but the mood is generally overwhelmingly bleak and lugubrious. Incest and abuse don’t leave much space for any comic interludes. This is a powerful film with a grinding intensity about it. Light relief it isn’t but Dark River still has quite an impact.

Alamy

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Zama

Late on in Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s startling, highly original new feature, Zama, a character who has just had both his arms cut off, is advised to “shove your stumps in the sand … if you don’t bleed out, you’ll survive.” It’s a grisly, darkly humorous moment in a film that continually surprises us with both its brutality and its lyricism.

The Match Factory

The best films of 2018 (so far)

The Breadwinner

The most dispiriting aspect of this otherwise enrapturing Oscar-nominated animated feature is that its storyline still seems so current. The film depicts an Afghan society in which women don’t have a face. It is set during the Taliban rule, which lasted from the mid-1990s until late 2001, but this doesn’t feel like a period piece. Seventeen years after the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan following the US invasion, the plight of women in the country appears hardly to have improved.

GKIDS

The best films of 2018 (so far)

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s work sometimes risks sensory overload. He fires off so many different ideas and storytelling styles that audiences can become bamboozled by his scattergun approach. BlacKkKlansman is one of his very best films because the digressions are as entertaining as ever but don’t get in the way of the main story.

AP

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Early Man

Much of the pleasure in Aardman films has always lain in their gently ironic, Alan Bennett-like humour. They take very exotic characters and subject matter but then deal with them in a matter-of-fact fashion. They make a virtue out of their own relative modesty. Early Man isn’t the flashiest animated feature that you’ll see this year but it is certainly the most likeable.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Isle of Dogs

Like all of Wes Anderson’s work, Isle Of Dogs is very stylised, very offbeat and characterised by its extremely dry and often ironic humour. This Japanese-set stop-motion fable is also gorgeous to look at – packed full of intricate visual detail. It deals with some weighty themes (ethnic cleansing, fascism and corruption) but does so in an idiosyncratic fashion.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri

Writer-director Martin McDonagh has a host of award-winning plays behind him but his movies haven’t always lived up to his stage work. This one certainly does. It shares some of the dark and nihilistic humour found in McDonagh’s previous film, Seven Psychopaths.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

A Quiet Place

In an era of wearisome poltergeist movies, haunted house stories and torture porn, A Quiet Place is a refreshingly pared-down and very original affair. Director John Krasinski relies on editing, sound effects and off-screen action to crank up the tension. We do see the creatures from time to time, sometimes even in extreme closeup. They are very grotesque, bigger versions of the polyp-like succubus which exploded out of John Hurt’s stomach in Alien. However, the most terrifying moments here come when the humans are waiting for them to appear, desperately hoping that they won’t.

Paramount Pictures

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Lady Bird

Lady Bird is one of the best American coming-of-age films since Barry Levinson’s Diner. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, it offers an utterly winning mix of humour, poignancy and sharp-eyed social observation. Gerwig approaches her subject matter with the same tenderness and affectionate irony with which the adolescent Lady Bird regards Sacramento. Gerwig also shows Lady Bird’s heroism as the young heroine strives against the odds to become the very best version of herself she can be.

A24

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Phantom Thread

If Phantom Thread is indeed Daniel Day-Lewis’s final film as an actor, he is going out on a wondrously bizarre note. This must be the oddest film in his career, one in which he gives a typically commanding but very idiosyncratic performance. Almost everything here is jarring – but generally in a very positive way.

The best films of 2018 (so far)

First Reformed

It is not so long ago that Paul Schrader seemed to be giving up on cinema. The American writer-director (whose credits include Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Affliction) had taken to making movies like the sour Hollywood satire The Canyons with Lindsay Lohan and the cartoonishly violent Dog Eat Dog, shot cheaply, aimed at a VOD audience. The former had a montage of closed-down movie theatres. In interviews, Schrader struck a gloomy note about the future of the industry. This is why First Reformed is so refreshing. This is not just Schrader’s best film in a very long while. It is also a re-affirmation of the director’s belief in the medium.

Rex

The best films of 2018 (so far)

The Happy Prince

Oscar Wilde goes to ruin in Rupert Everett’s debut feature as director. Everett also wrote and stars in the film, giving a grandstanding performance as the Irish writer at the end of his life, after his release from prison, where he has been doing hard labour for “gross indecency”. This is a moving and surprising biopic that squeezes out every last drop of pathos from its subject matter.

BBC Films

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Black Panther

Black Panther is not only one of the most entertaining recent superhero films but has an intelligence and a political dimension that such inchoate offerings as Suicide Squad and Justice League completely lacked. It is an action movie which touches on Pan-Africanism and which owes as much to Malcolm X as it does to Batman or Captain America.

Marvel Studios/Disney

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Sicilian Ghost Story

Sicilian Ghost Story is a genre-bending affair that combines elements of teen romance, gothic psycho-drama and political thriller. It is loosely based on a true story of a boy called Giuseppe Di Matteo whose father, an ex-member of the Sicilian Mafia, turned “grass” against his erstwhile associates. The Mafia responded by kidnapping Giuseppe and keeping him in captivity for nearly 800 days.

Altitude

The best films of 2018 (so far)

First Man

First Man is all about understated heroism. It’s affecting precisely because Armstrong (played with quiet intensity by Ryan Gosling) doesn’t feel the continual need to boast about his mission. The film is a tearjerker but a very subtle one.

AP

The best films of 2018 (so far)

Dogman

Dogman is one of the best Italian films of recent times, a modern day neo realist fable that bears comparison with the great work of Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica et al. Its main character, the dog groomer Marcello (Marcello Fonte), is a wonderful creation: loveable, vulnerable, seedy and comic all at the same time.

Curzon Artificial Eye

What You Gonna Do When The World's On Fire, a documentary by Roberto Minervini that follows a Louisiana community during the summer of 2017, in the aftermath of a string of police shootings of black men, won the Grierson Award in the documentary competition.

Meanwhile Lasting Marks, a short documentary by Charlie Lyne about 16 men put on trial for sadomasochism in the 1980s won the short film award.

Tricia Tuttle, artistic director of the festival, said: “The 2018 LFF Awards nominations demonstrate the vibrancy of global filmmaking and I'm delighted for the winning filmmakers who have triumphed at the 62nd BFI London Film Festival.

“After much jury deliberation, our wonderful juries have selected four extraordinary films which encourage dialogue and understanding around issues of race, class, gender and sexuality.

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“I applaud Sudabeh, Lukas, Roberto and Charlie for their boldly distinctive work and hope that our awards can help focus even more attention from UK and global audiences on their truly deserving films.

“For the first time, we've also placed audiences at the very heart of the awards celebration and I'm thrilled to be presenting the winners to packed houses of adventurous filmgoers.”

Additional reporting by agencies.

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