London Film Festival opening night

The 50th LFF opens with a gala screening of 'The Last King of Scotland'

Oct 20 2006

The London Film Festival opened last night with a gala screening in Leicester Square of Kevin Macdonald's 'The Last King of Scotland', which stars Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin and James McAvoy as his naive personal physician, Nicholas Garrigan.

There's an intimate, urgent feel to the first fiction feature from the director of 'One Day in September' and 'Touching the Void'. Macdonald and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan ('The Queen') have adapted Giles Foden's source novel, which imagines that a ballsy young Scottish medical graduate, Garrigan arrives in Africa in the mid-1970s and accidentally ingratiates himself with Scot-fan Amin, the president of Uganda.

It's a Faustian relationship that allows us to consider Amin up close as unpredictable, charming, despotic and vulnerable. Whitaker's dedicated, nuanced performance is excellent and lifts the film from some unsteady moments, while the film's local focus, all interior and personal, hints at the creeping menace at the core of Amin's rule while allying the viewer with Garrigan's own seduction. Garrigan's gullibility - coupled with the wily behaviour of Simon McBurney's foreign office stooge - stresses the post-colonial context of Amin's power and turns the mirror on the west.

Last night's screening saw introductory speeches from BFI director Amanda Nevill, BFI chair Anthony Minghella, festival artistic director Sandra Hebron and director Macdonald. The best speech of the night was the last: the Ugandan actor Stephen Rwangyezi, an actor in the film, took to the stage in bright traditional dress and held the audience captive with a moving speech on behalf of his country. 'Perhaps I should do what Idi Amin did when he spoke to the UN,' Rwangyezi offered. 'He spoke for three hours in Luganda, which he knew nobody could translate.'

After the screening, the festival celebrated the opening of its fiftieth edition at a party in Mayfair's Berkeley Square that went on until the small hours. We can confidently report that Time Out was holding its own at the bar until the lights went up.

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