The 2025 BFI London Film Festival has announced a particularly rich programme, one that emphasising its role as a global event for daring, ambitious as well as diverse cinema. Among the many highlights, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is probably one of the year’s most anticipated Gala selections. The darkly comic thriller follows a desperate man who, in his frantic bid to land a new job, begins plotting inventive ways to remove his rivals. While the film missed out on top prizes at the Venice Film Festival, its London bow offers fresh start for the film and its director.

Asian cinema enjoys a great presence at this year’s festival, with more than twenty films representing the region across strands. Yoon Ga-eun’s The World of Love, screening in the Love strand, takes a tender yet piercing look at adolescence through the eyes of Jooin, a mercurial 17-year-old grabbling with family, friendship, and the mysteries of young love. Tsou Shih-Ching’s Left Hand Girl also finds its place in the Love strand, exploring generational tensions in Taipei through the story of a single mother and her daughters, while examining how superstition and tradition collide with modern realities.

Bi Gan returns with Resurrection, an odyssey about a woman who slips into an “eternal time zone” during surgery, where her encounters with an android open up a surreal meditation on memory, consciousness, and awakening.

Meanwhile, Hikari’s Rental Family brings both poignancy and humour to the American Express Gala. The film follows a struggling American actor in Tokyo who, through a Japanese company, is hired to play surrogate roles in strangers’ lives. What begins as performance soon evolves into an exploration of identity, belonging, and the fragile masks people wear to get through life.

Fresh voices also make their mark. Calif Chong’s debut High Wire brings exuberance to the Journey strand, telling of a rural English woman swept into the colourful world of a travelling circus. Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu offers a moving portrait of a father’s sacrifices and strength in New York’s Chinatown, inspired by personal memory. And Hsu Ya-Ting’s Island of the Winds, screening in the Debate strand, shines a light on Taiwan’s Lesheng Sanatorium, where leprosy patients have been confined for decades – a work of urgency that combines history and human rights testimony.

One unmissable title is Anuparna Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees, fresh off her Best Director win at Venice Film Festival.

With this line-up, the BFI London Film Festival continues to be more than a platform for premieres – it is a meeting point for cinema that provokes and entertains. This year’s selection of Asian films is particularly impressive, presenting the festival’s focus on stories with universal appeal.

For tickets and full program visit BFI website.

_{View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to films, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. With rich content already available to our readers, we aim to expand our reach and grow alongside our audience by delving deeper into emerging platforms such as K-pop and Asian music more broadly. At the same time, we remain committed to exploring the vibrant and ever-evolving global landscape of film, music, and the arts, celebrating the immense talent and creativity that define these industries worldwide.}