Amazon’s Prime Video Stephen Odubola-Taz Skylar Picture ‘Gassed Up’ Scoops LFF Audience Award As 67th Edition Posts Record Participation

Melanie Goodfellow
·3 min read
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UK director George Amponsah’s thriller Gassed Up has won the London Film Festival (LFF) Audience Award for Best Feature in the 67th edition running from October 4 to 15, as the event also posts record participation.

Further Audiences Award winners, which were announced on Monday, went to The Taste of Mango for Best Documentary, Festival of Slaps for Best British Film/Work and Murals for Best Immersive Work/XR.

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Amponsah’s London-set thriller stars Stephen Odubola (Blue Story, Boiling Point) as a member of a moped street crime gang, who gets on the wrong side of an Albanian crime family.

Archie Maddocks co-wrote the screenplay with One Piece breakout Taz Skylar, who also appears in the film, with other cast including including Steve Toussaint (House Of The Dragon) and Tobias Jowett, soon to be seen in Nick Hamm’s upcoming epic William Tell.

The thriller marks Amponsah’s first fiction feature after a career spent in non-fiction with credits including Black Power: A Story Of British Resistance and Enslaved.

Amazon’s Prime Video boarded the film in 2022 in a move green lighting the production. The movie is lead produced by Rupert Preston and Ed Caffrey of Sunrise Films and Bart Ruspoli and Hester Ruoff of Ascendant Fox. Vertigo Releasing will release the film theatrically in the UK on February 9 2024.

Chloe Abrahams’ debut The Taste Of Mango follows three generations of women spanning Sri Lanka to London; Abdou Cisse’s Festival of Slaps is a humorous reflection on cultural stereotypes viewed through a Nigerian mother’s slap, while Alex Topaller, Daniel Shapiro and Artem Ivanenko Murals is an immersive work showing the devastation of war in Ukraine juxtaposed with Banksy’s murals.

In the previously announced official jury awards, Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi clinched the best film prize with Evil Does Not Exist.

The LFF also gave a breakdown on participation over the 12-day 67th edition.

There was a record audience of 430,550 individual participants across the entire UK-wide program, spanning features, series, shorts, immersive art and extended reality works via LFF Expanded, Screen Talks, LFF For Free events, including free short films on BFI Player, and the LFF Industry Forum.

Breaking this down, the festival said its program of 252 titles and Screen Talks, a programme of events for industry delegates, and LFF For Free events had drawn 195,665 participants, the highest in-person attendance in the last five years.

Occupancy across the festival’s London in-cinema screenings and events has increased to 90%, up from 87% in 2022 and higher than pre-pandemic levels of 84% in 2018 and 83% in 2019.

Another 225,577 LFF spectators had participated online, with over half of this year’s bookers (54%) new to the festival.

LFF said the 67th edition had welcomed more than 800 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives to present their work at venues across the capital.

Breaking down details on the 252 titles showcased this year, comprising features, shorts, XR works and series, LFF said they hailed from 92 countries, and featured 79 languages with 39% of works from female and non-binary filmmakers.

All the features and series were screening to UK audiences for the first time, including 29 world premieres (14 features, 2 series and 13 shorts), 7 international premieres (6 features and 1 short) and 30 European premieres (22 features, 1 series and 7 shorts).

The LFF Industry Forum also saw a rise in participation to to welcomed 3,649 delegates, from last year’s 3,254 last year.

Industry highlights included the Screen Talks program at Picturehouse Central, which featured conversations with American Academy and BAFTA heads Bill Kramer and Jane Millichip as well as Jennifer Lee, Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Carole Baraton, Founder and CEO of French sales company Charades.

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