Kibwe Tavares & Daniel Kaluuya’s Dystopian Thriller ‘The Kitchen’ To Close London Film Festival

Zac Ntim
·2 min read
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The London Film Festival (LFF) announced today that it will close its upcoming 67th edition with the dystopian thriller The Kitchen, directed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, for Netflix.

The film will receive its World Premiere on October 15 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall ahead of its release in UK cinemas and subsequent launch on Netflix. The Kitchen was made in association with Film4, who also supported the film’s development and is produced by DMC Film and 59% Productions.

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The film stars veteran actor and musician Kane “Kano” Robinson alongside Jedaiah Bannerman, Hope Ikpoku Jr, Teija Kabs, Demmy Ladipo, Cristale, and BackRoad Gee. Kaluuya co-wrote the project with Joe Murtagh. Synopsis reads: In a dystopian London, the gap between rich and poor has been stretched to its limits. All forms of social housing have been eradicated and only The Kitchen remains. A community that refuses to move out of the place they call home. This is where we meet a solitary Izi (Kane Robinson), living here by necessity and desperately trying to find a way out, and a 12-year-old Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), who has lost his mother and is searching for a family. We follow our unlikely pair as they struggle to forge a relationship in a system that is stacked against them.

“Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya have made a film that totally explodes our expectations of contemporary UK cinema,” said Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival Director. “The Kitchen offers such scope for audiences – the essential social politics and high-octane energy gel perfectly to create an electrifying big-screen experience. We could not be more excited to close the festival with this inventive film set in a near future London that showcases this incredibly talented team who call this city home.”

Tavares and Kaluuya added: “We both grew up in London, and The Kitchen is a love letter to our city, so it’s a true honor to premiere it here, in our hometown, on the closing night of BFI’s London Film Festival. Starting a decade ago as a workshop in a local Barbershop, the film’s journey from script to screen has been a continued collaboration between us, and the community of cast and crew that came to make up our “Kitchen,” including our two amazing leads Kane Robinson and Jedaiah Bannerman whose performances anchor the heart of our story. Together we have aimed to make something fresh, thoughtful and cinematic – an allegory and homage to the residents of ‘The Kitchen’ in every city in the world.”

This year LFF runs Oct 4 – 15.

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