The London Film Festival sprawls across the city, from the café-laden streets of Shoreditch to the glamour of Southbank, by the Thames. Cult cinemas like the Prince Charles and megaplexes like the Odeon off Leicester Square premiere films from around the world. This year, festival darlings like Sally Potter (The Party) and Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers) found themselves front and center against a backdrop of drama, comedy and experimental art.

This was my first time navigating the London Film Festival, and I arrived with two goals in mind: first, to see as many animated films as I could, and second, to follow word-of-mouth to hidden gems. I was certainly successful in my pursuit of animation which took me globetrotting through films from Japan, Germany, Ireland and France. But it was my first movie of the London Film Festival, The Breadwinner, that set an impossibly high standard for the remainder of the event.

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