Meet the ancestors... Book now for the BFI London Film Festival.

Booking is now open for the 2018 London Film Festival and it's a special year for silent film.

The Archive Gala will be a spectacular glimpse of our Great-Grandparents' lives in the IMAX screening of The Great Victorian Picture Show, a compilation of films from 1897 to 1901 all taken from 68mm film (four times the size of ordinary 35mm) which has captured so much detail from the samples I have seen.

We're promised "...gorgeous panoramic vistas to dizzying 'phantom rides', from music hall turns to the pomp of royal pageantry, from the bustle of the Victorian street to genuine dispatches from the Boer War" drawn from over 700 newly-digitised films that will be launched online to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria's birth next year.

Meet the ancestors

For those who don't know, the BFI IMAX is the largest cinema screen in Britain, measuring 26m by 20m with a total screen size of 520m²... you will never be this close to stepping into your forefathers' shoes and watch out for those trams, they come at you pretty fast!

BFI silent film curator Bryony Dixon has programmed the screening and will be act as our guide on the night through this extreme close-up on history. I am also very excited to hear the score from the Kennington Bioscope's own John Sweeney and his Biograph Band.

Be there on 20th and be Victorian! Mine's a flat cap and a pint of Mild please!

Fragment of An Empire (1929)

Another film I'm particularly looking forward to for musical as well as cinematic reasons is Fridrikh Ermler's Fragment of An Empire (1929) which will feature accompaniment from multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne along with Frank Bockius for whom the term percussionist seems so inadequate. The film concerns a soldier returning to Russia after losing his memory for ten years... the country he finds is vastly different than the one he remembered or anticipated.

This film has been described as the most important film in Soviet cinema and you can understand how its critique of the post-revolutionary world might justify that. We'll find out on Friday 19th.

Lovely couple, aren't they?

Two films I have seen I can heartily recommend: the stunning new restoration of Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven (1927) which I saw in July at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna. It's a beautiful film with two stunning leads in Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor - one of the greatest love stories in silent film (yes, I do have a poster of Janet on my wall...). It's a film in love with the idea of love, its power and endurance in spite of everything. You will be moved!

Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel don't quite hit the same heights but Lights of Old Broadway (1925) is a cracking film based around the shift from gas to electric lighting in New York. Marion plays twins separated at birth - one growing up posh and the other Irish (or Oirish given the tone of the intertitles!). There's plenty of action and it also features gorgeous sequences in colour using tinting, Technicolor, and the Handschiegl colour process.

Lights of Old Broadway (1925) Technicolor fragment from Library of Congress Photograph of the nitrate print by Barbara Flueckiger

One of the most important films of the entire festival is Be Natural: the Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, not only the first woman director but one of the major figures in all early film.

Alice Guy-Blaché is missing from most film histories and, in her first film, Pamela B Green aims to correct this injustice by highlighting her importance as a cinematic pioneer. Guy-Blaché directed her first film in 1896 and she became head of production Gaumont studios in Paris, before opening her own studio and moving to the US. Guy-Blaché was astonishingly prolific working as a director, producer or writer on more than 1000 films - she helped develop the technique at the birth of cinema and her influence is still being felt. Jodie Foster narrates as if this wasn't already unmissable.

Alice Guy-Blaché directs Bessie Love and a horse

There's plenty more to be found in the Treasures strand including my Dad's favourite acting genius, Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and a fascinating French film about the early years of cinema, Silence is Golden (1943) starring Maurice Chevalier and directed by René Clair.

Elsa Lanchester - wife no. 4 and Charles Laughton - Henry no. 8

The most controversial classic film will no doubt be Peter Jackson's colourised compilation of Great War footage, They Shall Not Grow Old, which is also showing in 3D. The purists may baulk at the treatment of the source material but this sounds like an interesting way of bringing a new audience to the period both historically as well as cinematographically.

As an act of rememberance it's undeniably powerful and I always get lost in the faces of the men, fighting for an unknown future. Silent film is about reconnection and the London Film Festival is bringing us all a little closer this year.

They Shall Not Grow Old

The BFI London Film Festival takes place from 10-21 October 2018 and you can order your tickets NOW from the BFI website.