Supernature (Asif Kapadia producer) & Saipan and more reviews – London Film Festival 2025

More reviews from our coverage of London Film Festival…

Supernature – Real and moving

Director: Ed Sayers

1 hour 32 minutes (Documentary)

HOW MANY of you have Super 8 cameras in a loft or garage?
Care to dig them out…??? These are old school spool film cameras that have no sound but were relatively affordable before the ubiquity of the video camera and then our mobile phones…
The beauty of Ed Sayers film lays in the nostalgia these Super 8 films create and in this, its global scale, with footage from 25 countries and 40 individuals around the world.
He himself goes on something of a journey that way, having been brought to a Dorset beach to observe the seals when young – and then with his own Super 8 cine-film camera exploring the same landscape – this time without the seals…where have they gone?
This intriguing and slightly worrying consideration led him to lending Super 8 cameras to non professionals to document the world around them – not people themselves but landscapes and creatures.
The result is an incredibly powerful but quiet scream – if we can put it like that – about what is happening to the natural world around us and Sayers is quite subtle about it in the commentary.
In Complete Lockdown, we all heard and saw things we hadn’t before – we experienced the natural world, without the near constant hum of machines outside – and listened to a very different type of sound.
Sayers taps into this, narrating and composing this film with original Super 8 film and the camera folks’ own commentary, as well as his own.
It could be a tad shorter but most of it is compelling and fresh.
It is getting a BFI nationwide release and well deserved too – because of its simple beauty and its powerful call to take care of the earth we all inhabit.
Oscar-winner Asif Kapadia (‘Amy’) executively produces – go see it and fall in love with the world around us. ACV rating: **** (out of five)

BFI Distribution have acquired the rights to screen this film in the UK & Ireland. No release date has been announced at the time of going to press (see publication date).

Saipan – Football hath no fury, like a captain scorned

Lisa Barros D’Sa & Glenn Leyburn

1 hour 30 mins

FANS OF FOOTBALLER Roy Keane – both the former player and the current Sky Sports analyst of today – will enjoy this film which revolves centrally around the personality clash between Republic of Ireland manager Barnsley-England raised Mick McCarthy and the one-time Manchester United FC captain.
Keane is a straight talker and even now he doesn’t sugar-coat anything – perhaps back then he was just direct and honest, when so few players are – there is simply too much money at stake, to speak openly.
As the national Ireland football team prepared for the 2002 World Cup in Japan & South Korea, they gathered for a training camp in Saipan, which is an island in the Pacific Ocean.
The facility was far from ideal – they didn’t even have footballs and the training pitch was in bad shape – Keane let fly and from that moment on the tension between Keane and McCarthy erupted. Keane was a winner and played for the team of that time – Manchester U, winning titles at home and the European Cup – the game’s most prestigious club trophy, abroad. McCarthy was a decent club manager and player – he represented Ireland but never lived there – and this film does suggest that Keane wasn’t much enamoured by that.
D’Sa & Leyburn handle the pace and action well and are aided by a standout Keane in Eanna Hardwicke (on the right in the above picture), while the ever reliable Steve Coogan is McCarthy (left in the picture). Entertaining and interesting enough for the non-football nut, this also has a quotient of nostalgia and fun about it – after all football too is entertainment, just a game – even if national sides are seen as representatives of something far greater than the sum of their parts.
And Keane may still have something to say about small unfancied footballing nations going to the World Cup and there just to make up the numbers… the next one in the US, Canada and Mexico, next year, has 48 teams, increased from 32. Cape Verde, an island in the Atlantic Coast and a former Portuguese colony, just 300 plus miles from the continent of Africa and with a population just under 600,000, have made it into the competition for the first time.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you…haha. Acv rating: *** (out of five)

Saipan will be in UK cinemas from January 23 (2026)

Note – More LFF reviews will be added to this page in due course…