This year’s Leeds International Film Festival is even more epic – an extensive, diverse, and exciting programme presented across seven sections over 17 days and including three full weekends for the first time. If you want to see multiple films, the best value booking option is to buy one of our passes, with great discounts on tickets, and most of our passes can be shared with others too.
OFFICIAL SELECTION & LIFF 2023 FEATURE FILM COMPETITION
In Official Selection we present previews of many of the most talked about new films of the year and UK Premieres of films from exciting new filmmakers in our feature film competition. We are thrilled to open LIFF 2023 with Poor Things, the Venice Golden Lion winner starring Emma Stone and from director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). Closing LIFF 2023 is exquisite modern-day romance Slow from Lithuanian filmmaker Marija Kavtaradze who won Best Director at Sundance.
More new film highlights in Official Selection this year include Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, Justine Trier’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, Evil Does Not Exist from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), and food film heaven with The Taste of Things. We also have a brilliant line-up of acclaimed British debut features, including Hoard, How To Have Sex, and In Camera.
CINEMA VERSA
Cinema Versa brings together an irresistible selection of some of the best new documentaries. Apolonia, Apolonia is an extraordinary and intimate portrait of an emerging young artist. The Hostage Takers is a gut-wrenching documentary thriller about the interrogation of Islamic State terrorists. Mutiny in Heaven tells the definitive story of incendiary cult rock band The Birthday Party.
Documentary filmmakers excel at highlighting diversity and revealing different perspectives. Ramona enlightens the experiences of 15 young women who have experienced teenage pregnancy. This is Going to Be Big follows a group of neurodivergent schoolkids in Australia, rehearsing for a musical dedicated to musician John Farnham. Your Fat Friend profiles author and activist Aubrey Gordon, campaigning for fat acceptance and battling anti-fat bias.
Cinema Versa also explores the ethics of new technology in innovative gaming docs Knits Island and Break the Game, and the alarming new implications of deepfake pornography in Another Body.
FANOMENON
Fanomenon is the home at LIFF for fantasy, horror, sci-fi, dark comedy, animation, the indefinable, and more – back this year with a bigger line-up and the return of the legendary Night of the Dead at Hyde Park Picture House. Day of the Dead returns too and we have a new Sci-Fi Day.
Fanomenon is packed with new films that have wowed, shocked, thrilled, and entertained audiences at film festivals around the world. Highlights include psychological thriller Red Rooms and musical comedy anomaly Killing Romance from Fantasia film festival; wildly inventive sci-fi The Animal Kingdom, blood-soaked epic Conann, and gorgeous animated ode to friendship Robot Dreams from Cannes; and mesmerising sci-fi debut Animalia from Sundance.
We revisit films in the vaults in Fanomenon too and we are delighted to welcome E. Elias Merhige for Shadow of the Vampire and The Begotten Cycle, and to collaborate again with Queer Fear on The Hunger.
LIFF SHORTS
LIFF SHORTS is the new name for our programme section dedicated to short films. LIFF SHORTS 2023 opens on 8 November with the Yorkshire Short Film Competition, returning to the recently reopened Hyde Park Picture House. From 9 to 11 November, we present six more short film competitions including the Academy Award®-qualifying Louis le Prince International Short Film Competition – named after the Leeds pioneer who made the world’s first moving images in 1888 – and the World Animation Competition. LIFF SHORTS 2023 also includes the British Short Film Competition, and competitions for screendance, queer shorts, and music videos.
LIFF SHORTS 2023 closes on 11 November with the awards event at Howard Assembly Room when we will announce and screen the winning films for all seven competitions as judged by the juries. We will also present most of the short film selection on our streaming platform Leeds Film Player until 19 November.
LIFF SHORTS is presented in partnership with Stewarts.
THRILL RIDES
Thrill Rides at LIFF 2023 is a selection of famous and not-so-famous thrillers set on trains and at stations, or featuring classic train sequences, or where a train is an ominous background presence. We have three films by Hitchcock in the selection, with The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train, and North By Northwest, and there's Bond vs. Red Grant on the Orient Express in From Russia with Love.
The New York Subway is the setting for two gritty thrillers in the selection, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the little-known The Incident. Trains are unleashed in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, which was never released in UK cinemas. Thrill Rides also includes rarely screened classics Night Train, set entirely in a single compartment, and The Train Robbers, with the UK Premiere of its 4K restoration presented at LIFF 2023.
CINEMA AMOUR
In Cinema Amour we bring together a very special programme of new documentaries, archive films and talks exploring ‘cinephilia’, or the love for film and cinemas. New documentaries take us to the lost cinemas of Recife in Brazil, a legendary New York Video Shop, a film club in Southwestern Nigeria, an underground film collection hidden in the basements of Tehran, a lovingly handcrafted cinema in a small Finnish village, and London’s most infamous repertory cinema. We delve into the history of the legendary Academy Cinema in Leeds with screenings of archive films originally presented to their audience.
With the beautifully restored Hyde Park Picture House returning as a leading venue for LIFF 2023, we are reminded that the spaces of cinema are just as important as the films themselves, and nothing rivals the magic of watching a film with others in your favourite neighbourhood cinema.
REAR VIEW
In Rear View we present a big-screen collection of 4K restorations of rarely-screened archive films, classics from the Netherlands as part of Dutch Discoveries, and film favourites screening for free. This year’s restorations include Bushman (USA), The Dupes (Syria), and Nomad - Director’s Cut (Hong Kong), and the UK Premieres of the restored versions of two films made in 1966 by Japanese master stylist Yasuzo Masumura – The Spider Tattoo and The Red Angel.
Our Dutch Discoveries selection at LIFF 2023 includes three features from new filmmakers in Official Selection, a LIFF Shorts programme, and three classics in Rear View – Fanfare, A Question of Silence, and Metal and Melancholy. Our free breakfast screenings return to Hyde Park Picture House with Before Sunrise and Zazie dans le Métro, and we’re delighted to take LIFF to the wonderful The Old Fire Station in Gipton with a fitting, free screening of The Fireman’s Ball.
DUTCH DISCOVERIES AT LIFF 2023
LIFF 2023 presents a special selection of films from the Netherlands. Dutch Discoveries includes three new feature films in Official Selection, a programme of short films in LIFF SHORTS, and three rarely-screened archive films in Rear View.
Dutch Discoveries is supported by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and presented in partnership with Leeds 2023.
