The BFI have announced that the opening film for the 59th London Film Festival will be Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Cater and Meryl Streep.

The festival will run from the 7th to the 18th of October this year and once again the LFF will hold simulatenous screenings around the country throughout. A wise  continuation of the desire to share the cinematic love outside of the capital.

We’ll get a better idea of the full line up of the festival’s film in early September, and it is expected that Festival Director Clare Stewart will look to compound the identity of the LFF as a people’s, rather than a critic’s, festival.

We’re excited to see Suffragette open the festival, with a story so important to this country and to the world to be elevated is a sterling choice. Roll on October…

Here’s the new trailer,

Time for a little synopsis? Why not…

 

SUFFRAGETTE is a thrilling drama that tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.

These women were not primarily from the genteel educated classes, they were working women who had seen peaceful protest achieve nothing. Radicalized and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives.

MAUD (Carey Mulligan) was one such foot soldier. The story of her fight for dignity is as gripping and visceral as any thriller, it is also heart-breaking and inspirational.