Daniel Craig, Saoirse Ronan and Sir Elton John lead BFI film festival line-up

Daniel Craig, Saoirse Ronan and Sir Elton John top the full line-up of the 68th BFI London Film Festival.

The event will boast 39 world premieres including Sir Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which will open the festival and star Ronan, while Morgan Neville’s Piece By Piece will close it.

There will also be the European premiere of RJ Cutler and David Furnish’s Elton John: Never Too Late, a documentary on Sir Elton’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

The festival will also host 12 international premieres among the 253 feature, short, series and immersive works it will screen in the BFI Southbank and Royal Festival Hall venues.

A curated selection of features will also be showcased at nine partner venues across the UK.

Features will hail from 79 countries and be shown in 63 languages, with 112 works made by female and non-binary filmmakers, making up 44% of the programme.

International premieres include Sadie Frost’s Twiggy documentary, Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy with Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff, Kimberly Reed’s I’m Your Venus, and Jane Mingay’s Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, which follows the rise of the Selecter singer.

Other world premieres include a restoration of Martin Rosen’s Watership Down, Laila Abbas’ Thank You for Banking with Us, Darren Thornton’s Irish comedy Four Mothers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Endurance, and Milko Lazarov’s Bulgarian drama Tarika.

Special presentations will include Craig talking an audience through his latest film Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire.

The festival’s First Feature Competition showcases upcoming director’s first films, with movies including Tumpal Tampubolon’s Crocodile Tears, Sylvia Le Fanu’s My Eternal Summer, and Laura Carreira’s On Falling.

Screen Talks will also be held by a number of directors and actors including Sir Steve, Denis Villeneuve and Daniel Kaluuya.

The festival will also run its LFF Expanded immersive art and extended reality programme, with installations at Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, BFI Southbank, BFI Imax and Outernet London.

Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival director, said: “Cinematic ideas materialise in many forms, and this year artists have taken us to some giddy highs and poked at our tender underbellies.

“Troubled histories linger close to the surface alongside optimistic futures, all explored in unique and creative ways.

“As the seasons change and we head into the autumn, we invite everyone to come to the BFI London Film Festival to discover and enjoy the whole spectrum of moving image.”

The event will take place across 12 days from October 9 to 20, with a full line-up and ticketing details available on the BFI website.