On the seventh floor of One Hundred Shoreditch hotel in east London, a group is gathered to celebrate their nominations for this year’s British independent film awards (Bifas). The favoured look is all angular shoulders, up-and-coming designers and luxe fabrics; these are some of the most innovative talents in British cinema today, and they dress like it.
Is every year this exciting? Or do these nominees represent the start of something fresh, the crest of a new wave? The solid box office performance of frontrunners Scrapper and Rye Lane bodes well – both have broken the $1m takings mark worldwide – as does the more ineffable general mood. “It definitely feels like that,” says Paris Zarcilla, writer-director of SXSW prize-winning domestic-servitude chiller Raging Grace, released in the UK on 29 December. “I think we’re seeing people finally being able to make exactly the films they want to make, without having to second guess audience tastes.” Zarcilla’s own film, the first British-Filipino feature in UK cinema history, is an example of what riches can result from this approach.
So while last year Charlotte Wells’s shimmering, emotionally astute drama Aftersun had a near clean sweep – winning seven of the 16 Bifa categories it was nominated in, including best film and best director – this year the field is both crowded and diverse. No longer does the phrase “British independent film” instantly bring to mind a particular sort of gritty, miserable social-realist drama. There will always be room for some of that – we are British cinema lovers and you will prise our BFI Alan Clarke box sets from our cold, dead hands – but now the typical Bifa film is harder to pin down. It’s as unpredictable as the plot of the psychosexual noir Femme, as soulfully surreal as the film industry satire In Camera or as transcendently moving as All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s supernatural relationships drama starring perennial indie favourites Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.
At tonight’s party, the buzz seems to belong equally to all these films and more. South London romcom Rye Lane is clearly as adored as it is adorable. People can’t stop talking about the consent issues posed by Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex or the emotional immediacy of the performances in Mahalia Belo’s forthcoming dystopian thriller The End We Start From starring Jodie Comer, while Abdou Cisse’s fabulously titled short Festival of Slaps is, by firm consensus, as explosive as it sounds.
That makes predicting the eventual winners trickier than ever, but then aren’t they all already winners? And not just in the school cross-country, everyone-gets-a-medal-for-taking-part sense, either. Several of tonight’s nominees are already laden with awards from the international festival circuit – an Un Certain Regard here, a special jury prize there. It’s just as well, then, that trophy design is another area in which Bifa sets itself apart. The eventual winners will take home a chic 1kg of marbled blue-and-white, made from 100% recycled plastic waste (compared with Bafta’s 3.7kg of marble and brass), as light on the eco-conscience as it is in the pocket.
Maybe something else besides traffic fumes has drifted up from the financial district on the night air? From the transatlantic perspective of best supporting actress nominee Katherine Waterston (The End We Start From), that certain something is easily identifiable: “People always say, ‘Why is it that there’s so many exciting young film-makers in England?’ Well, it’s usually because they’re able to take risks, with organisations like the BFI, BBC Film and Film4 taking a chance on them, and supporting them while they take those risks.”
Indeed, if there’s one thing that unites 2023’s Bifa-nominated cohort it’s this embrace of the “high-risk, high-reward” ethos: “I mean there’s a film called How to Have Sex,” chimes in Rye Lane star David Jonsson. “Just Googling that is risky!”
The Bifa awards will be held on Sunday 3 December
How to Have Sex
Mia McKenna-Bruce, nominated for best lead performance
It’s rare that a film connects with audiences on the bass-throbbing, heart-pumping, trauma-unpacking level that How to Have Sex has done. Molly Manning Walker based her debut feature on her own post-GCSE clubbing holidays, but somehow it also tells the story of every awkward, drunken British adolescence, including that of star Mia McKenna-Bruce: “Before we even started filming in Malia, the script had me talking to my old school friends about all those times that we pretended we enjoyed the ‘jokes’, pretended to be OK with them, when, actually, you’re not.”
Despite easily passing for 16 in the film, McKenna-Bruce is actually 26, with credits in EastEnders and Netflix’s 2022 Persuasion adaptation. It’s her subtle, sympathetic performance as Tara that’s made her name, though, and it was during the standing ovation that followed How to Have Sex’s Cannes film festival premiere that the import of this major milestone began to sink in: “To this day, it’s just the craziest, most overwhelming moment of my life… And I’ve had a baby since!”
Polite Society
Priya Kansara, breakthrough performance
You expect Priya Kansara to enter the room with a roundhouse kick, such is the all-action ferocity of her breakthrough performance as aspirant stunt woman Ria in Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society. She says she loved training for the film so much, she’s carried on practising jujitsu in her daily life: “I’m fully conditioned. I can beat up all of the bad guys!” she says with a convincingly mean mug. “No, I’m joking. I’d be the first to run away in any situation!”
In fact, Kansara’s entrance was more of a graceful glide, as would befit the debutant she played in a few scenes of Bridgerton’s second season. Make no mistake, though, when it comes to fighting her film’s corner, she’s always on an action footing: “This isn’t the kind of movie that you would necessarily associate with the Bifas, but then, when you think of a commercial action-comedy, this doesn’t come to mind either. It doesn’t fit any of the typical boxes. I’m just so proud to have been a part of something that’s stepped outside the box and stood in its own craziness and weirdness!”
Femme
George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, best joint lead performance
The thrill of meeting actors who turn out to be nothing like their characters is magnified tenfold when the stars of Femme start talking. That’s because their noir-ish, revenge-porn romantic thriller, out on 1 December, doesn’t just feature transformative performances, it’s also about the role of performance in our lives. “Putting on faces, code-switching… all that stuff was really in there,” says Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, who plays Jules, a sometime drag artist who becomes entangled in a complicated power struggle with his gay basher turned lover. “It felt like an exploration of masculinity, the levels of Jules, and how empowered he felt at certain points.”
Co-star George MacKay’s enthusiastic nodding suggests he felt equally inspired. Though best known as a young soldier in Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winner 1917, MacKay is a revelation as closeted ex-con Preston. This he attributes mainly to the on-set vibe: “It was an amazingly young crew, and there was a real sort of enthusiasm, energy to the whole place… Even just shooting the night scenes in London, there was a feeling like we were rebelling against something.”
The End We Start From
Katherine Waterston, best supporting performance
In Mahalia Belo’s oddly life-affirming survival thriller The End We Start From (out on 19 January), Katherine Waterston plays one of those God-sent women who can maintain not only her sanity, but also her sense of humour in the bleakest situations. “[Screenwriter] Alice Birch is such an extraordinary writer I got well primed to love [my character] O long before she turned up in the script,” agrees Waterston. “And then the question becomes, ‘Do I have anything to offer?’ I had this pit-of-the stomach dread, like, ‘Oh God, O’s so fascinating, can I become her?’” But ultimately, “playing her reminded me why I love doing this”.
So while Waterston, the British-American star of Inherent Vice and the Fantastic Beasts franchise, has been nominated for a total of 14 acting awards over the course of her career, this one, her first Bifa, is special: “I do think there’s more freedom in [British independent film] and where there’s more freedom, there’s better characters. They are not designed by committee.”
In Camera
Nabhaan Rizwan, best lead performance
In a better world, the suave, hyper-intelligent, ever-unruffled star of In Camera (out next year) would have been cast as the next 007 already. But then, after roles in such cult projects as Riz Ahmed’s Mogul Mowgli and TV miniseries Station Eleven, would playing the establishment icon even appeal? “Oh, you can be an artist and do a franchise,” Nabhaan Rizwan says. “I would do it if I’m allowed to lean in, in a way I want to, and question everything… You have to question everything you inherit: from your parents, from the culture you grew up in, and from the industry we’re stepping into.”
That opportunity to question is exactly what Rizwan’s electrifying In Camera collaboration with first-time writer-director Naqqash Khalid has afforded. That such a passionate and provocative film could not only get made, but also be award-nominated, is a sure sign of a British film scene in rude health. Rizwan says he too feels rejuvenated by the experience: “This feels like a start for me in many ways, like a debut, even though it’s not. I love working with first-time directors and Naqqash in particular, because you learn to walk together, but you also learn to fly together.”
Rye Lane
Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson, best joint lead performance
“It’s actually a horror,” deadpans Vivian Oparah when someone congratulates her on co-starring in the buzziest romcom of the year – no, the decade. “It’s about the horror of dating in London.” Fans of Rye Lane, though, will recognise this as another example of the cheerfully cheeky humour that buoys Oparah’s character Yas and her love interest Dom (David Jonsson) on their multi-stop walking tour of Peckham’s most romantic destinations.
Promoting the film has since taken the pair far beyond south London’s borders and along the way they’ve developed the kind of undeniable chemistry that results in accidentally colour-coordinated outfits. “Every day this happened in Sundance. Every day!” fumes Oparah, looking from her green-patterned dress to Jonsson’s green-tinged gold shirt, which looks even greener when it’s not illuminated by the camera-flash. “She hates me really,” grins Jonsson. “Sooo much” says Oparah through teeth that remain gritted only briefly before they fall about laughing again. So yes, Rye Lane’s “rom” may have been conjured by the craft of writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia and director Raine Allen-Miller, but the “com” part? That’s very much for real.
