PANAH PANAHI’S debut Iranian family road trip movie Hit The Road won the top award at this year’s BFI London Film Festival which returned in full swing despite the ongoing pandemic.

It opened with London-born musician and film-maker Jeymes Samuel’s debut feature, bold and stylish Western The Harder They Fall, inspired by the real-life stories of African-American cowboys.

While Joel Coen’s first solo directorial debut The Tragedy of Macbeth starring his wife Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington in this fresh and haunting black and white adaptation of Shakespeare’s renowned work brought the LFF to a close.

Here are my top film picks from this year’s LFF starting with Belfast, a gorgeous yet heartbreaking drama set in 1969 which is writer-director Kenneth Branagh’s most personal film to date. He revisits his childhood through the story of Buddy (a captivating and major revelation Jude Hill,) a young boy whose joyful life is upended with the outbreak of sectarian violence.

Shot in glorious black and white and underscored by a rousing Van Morrison soundtrack the film balances moments of trauma and poignancy with those of marvel and elation without plunging into nostalgic sentimentality.

It is driven home by a superlative cast which includes Caitriona Balfe (Outlander) and Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey) as Buddy's working-class parents and Judi Dench and and Ciaran Hinds as his grandparents.

With exclusive access to one of New York City’s hardest hit hospitals during the first four months of the pandemic in March 2020 Matthew Heineman’s powerful documentary The First Wave chronicles the stress and the harrowing ordeal faced by front-line staff as they risked their lives to save those of Covid-19 patients, happening across the world.

The film pulls no punches in portraying the devastation wreaked by the coronavirus in the first wave, which is heart-wrenching. It is definitely a must see for all anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and those who are still convinced Covid isn’t real or is merely like the flu.

Boiling Point – shot in a single take, this riveting and wonderfully acted pot boiler follows a troubled head chef (Stephen Graham) as he struggles to keep it together on the busiest night at his top London restaurant. Graham delivers a knockout performance in this gripping drama (based on actor turned director Philip Barantini’s 2019 short film which also stars Graham) that captures the relentless pressure of a restaurant kitchen.

Juan Antonio Moreno’s documentary Welcome to Spain provides a unique and fascinating insight into the refugee experience. The country is viewed through the eyes of a number of recently arrived immigrants at a refugee centre in Seville which was formerly a bordello.

Narrated by Moreno, the film shows the difficulties they face trying to navigate Spanish bureaucracy and red tape and to integrate into Spanish society amid anti-immigrant sentiments.

Paolo Sorrentino’s semi-autobiographical family drama The Hand of Dog is set in the 1980s during Naples’ obsession with Argentine football player Diego Maradona and is his most personal work to date.

More than 30 years in the making it follows the story of socially awkward teenager Fabietto (Filippo Scotti) as he comes to terms with the death of his parents in a freak accident. It is bitingly funny, surprisingly touching and totally outrageous with one shocking scene which will forever be seared into my brain.

In Last Night in Soho a small town working-class girl, who is obsessed with the swinging sixties, is transported back to 1966 London in this wonderfully stylish, visually stunning and inventive horror crime drama from Edgar Wright.

It features cracking performances from its leads McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit), Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit) and Matt Smith (The Crown, Dr Who) plus Diana Rigg in her last ever film role.

Memorable mentions go to Wes Anderson’s surreal The French Dispatch, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Terence Davies’s Benediction which explores the life of first world war English gay poet Siegfried Sassoon. All soon to hit a screen near you.