The 53rd LFF came to a glittery close last night with the world premiere of Nowhere Boy

Jeane Smith, 84, hasn’t been to the cinema for nearly 40 years. So where better to take her, and four friends, than the London film festival, to see An Education, a coming-of-age movie set in swinging 60s London?

This tale of a young John Lennon, torn between his legendary mother and equally formidable aunt, is an accomplished feature debut from Sam Taylor-Wood

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror,” wrote Sigmund Freud – and Sigmund Freud was never twirled by his mum lasciviously around in a coffee bar to the novel sounds of rock’n'roll on the jukebox, and furthermore gigglingly taught by her that “rock’n'roll” actually means sex.

This was the dizzyingly erotic experience of the young John Lennon – played by 19-year-old newcomer Aaron Johnson – in this account of his painful, messy teenage years in 1950s Liverpool, written by Matt Greenhalgh (the author of Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic, Control) and directed by Sam Taylor-Wood.

The mother in question is the legendary Julia, played by Anne-Marie Duff, a cheerful lover of good times and rock’n'roll in all senses, who had a mysterious breakdown after John’s birth and surrendered parental control to her sister, the Tchaikovsky-loving and equally legendary Aunt Mimi, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who brought him up strictly with genteel, middle-class values.

As adulthood dawns, John’s increasingly rebellious discontent manifests itself in re-establishing contact with the dangerous Julia, who passionately introduces him to his musical destiny. She and John begin a strange kind of Oedipal affair, with Julia as the mistress and Aunt Mimi the wronged wife. John’s story is the story of the duel between these two women – an intolerable situation for which music is the only way out.

Taylor-Wood interestingly begins her film with the opening, jangling chord from A Hard Day’s Night, left hanging in a protracted silence until its potential for implied menace and even tragedy has been allowed to float free. It’s a witty opening, but apart from pointed references to “nowhere” in the script and in the title, to a glimpse of Strawberry Field children’s home and to a schoolbook doodling of “Walrus”, Greenhalgh notably avoids cute prophetic touches. However, it has to be said Julia does hang around a bit possessively backstage, to the unease of both John and the young Paul McCartney, played by Thomas Sangster. Heroically, Greenhalgh avoids gags about John letting a woman get between him and the band.

It’s a handsomely made film, with a very game lead performance from Johnson, hampered perhaps only by the fact that Lennon is really a rather callow figure at this stage; unlike, say, the more interesting, more grownup Lennon that Ian Hart played in Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat. When John shows Julia an EP record of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, she asks where he got it, and John says he swapped it with a bloke at the docks. “Swapped it for what?” Julia asks sharply, and John has no idea what she’s implying.

Throughout the movie, I had the sense that Lennon was really a supporting turn and the stars were Julia and Mimi, but that, frustratingly, we were only ever allowed to see them from John’s lairy and semi-comprehending point of view. John has to be the focus, and part of the movie’s point is his youth, his poignant inability to appreciate how much these women love him.

And the film does contrive a tearful crisis in which the awful secret origins of the Mimi-John-Julia love triangle are laid bare. But for me, this finale was a little stagey, is resolved too easily and disconcertingly discloses a more intense story which has been happening, as it were, behind the movie’s back.

None the less, this is an accomplished feature debut from Taylor-Wood, and a satisfying follow-up to her likeable short film Love You More.

The feature film No One Knows About Persian Cats, showing at the festival tonight, shows an aspect of Tehran rarely seen by the west: its underground live music scene

In the first two weeks of June 2009, before the presidential election in Iran, TV audiences in the west were shown something different: young Iranians, mostly in Tehran, pushing strict rules on dress and behaviour to their limit as the authorities temporarily allowed a little more freedom. These people would be at the receiving end of the crackdown when it came after the vote.

Two months earlier, in April, Iran-American journalist Roxana Saberi had been sentenced to eight years on charges of spying for the United States. No One Knows About Persian Cats (Kasi Az Gorbehayeh Irani Khabar Nadareh), which shows at the London film festival tonight, brings the two strands together.

Co-written by Saberi (who was released in May) it is a film about the underground (ie illegal) live music scene in Tehran. These are bands with more to worry about than what haircut will work best in Camden. The story begins shortly after Ashkan, a member of an indie rock band, is released from jail and follows him and female singer Negar as they attempt to obtain, via forgers and bootleggers, the passports and visas that will allow them to leave Iran to play a gig in London.

Stylistically, it feels as stifling as their lives must surely be. The threat of the police and authorities is all around. Bands soundproof secret rehearsal spaces and venues; one heavy metal band avoids arrest by playing in a stinking cowshed on a farm far out of town; members of another band talk about having their instruments confiscated. The police are often out of shot, however – perhaps adding to the omnipresent menace and what feels like an arbitrary exercise of power. When Negar’s car is stopped and her pet dog taken from her, we never see the police officer who does the snatching.

The action, if that’s the word for it, takes place in below-stairs recording studios only reached via alleyways and through hidden doors. The feature – directed by Saberi’s fiance, Bahman Ghobadi – was shot discreetly in Tehran and has enough of a documentary feel to it (the titles announce it is based on “real events, people and locations”) that you can assume this is what Tehran’s indie rock scene does actually look like. In fact, a Canadian TV report from just before the election goes to what looks to be the same places and talks to musicians bravely recording and performing in them.

The TV report, however, shows up one of No One Knows About Persian Cats’ major flaws – that the music just isn’t very good (the Canadian TV crew find more musically interesting artists). In the latter stages of the film we hear Tehran bands playing – one purveying indie rock, another heavy metal, others blues and rap. All are derivative of western styles (which is kind of the point, it is such “decadence” that gets them banned) but don’t inject much more into it. The rap band depict Tehran as a “jungle” where someone else, usually with a car, always gets the girl: all very well – and probably true – but also true of Skee Lo’s pop rap portrait of Los Angeles in 1995′s I Wish.

While that is harsh, and I’m not making music in such difficult conditions, it begins to impact on the quality of the film. The documentary camera work of the film switches to a cut-to-the-beat music video-style montage whenever opening chords strike up, putting shots of everyday life in Tehran to song. Done once, it is fine. But by the third or fourth time, monotony sets in. What just saves it is the poignancy of the lyrics, such as “dreaming is my reality”.

Where Persian Cats works best is when it combines the dreams of being in a successful band and playing in London – the sort western audiences may be used to – with aspirations of personal and artistic freedom that those audiences would take for granted. It captures the absurdities of such a life – the prices of Iranian v Afghan forged passports ($4,000 v $500), or the bootlegger who promises the band that his access to the black market means “the whole of Tehran will hear”. It can sometimes feel as if Ghobadi is filming his friends, but while not a documentary (only “based on real people and events” after all) it does capture a moment and a feeling. And that is quite an achievement.

Negar and Ashkan, however, do not get their passports. In the closing scenes, their final Tehran gig is raided by police, and the sound rings in your ears long after the music fades away.

Jacques Audiard’s prison drama hailed as ‘a masterpiece’ as it takes the festival’s inaugural best film prize

Jacques Audiard’s prison saga Un Prophète (A Prophet) was last night named as the inaugural winner of the London film festival’s award for best feature film. The picture was first unveiled at the Cannes film festival back in May, where it took the jury prize but was beaten to the crowning Palme d’Or award by Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

Un Prophète tells the tale of an illiterate Arab convict who endures a harsh rite of passage when he is recruited by the Corsican mob. Announcing the award, jury chair Anjelica Huston hailed the film as “a masterpiece”. She added: “Un Prophète has the ambition, purity of vision and clarity of purpose to make it an instant classic. With seamless and imaginative storytelling, superb performances and universal themes, Jacques Audiard has made the perfect film.”

Last night’s awards ceremony, held at London’s Inner Temple, also spelled good news for screenwriter Jack Thorne, who was named best British newcomer for his work on the forthcoming coming-of-age drama The Scouting Book for Boys. Defamation, a study of antisemitism, won the prize for best documentary, while the Jaffa-set crime thriller Ajami – directed by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli – was named as best first feature. Elsewhere, there were BFI fellowships for British actor John Hurt and the Malian film-maker Souleyman Cissé.

The 53rd London film festival wraps up tonight with the world premiere of Nowhere Boy, artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s big-screen salute to the young John Lennon.

Jeane Smith, 84, hasn’t been to the cinema for nearly 40 years. So where better to take her, and four friends, than the London film festival, to see An Education, a coming-of-age movie set in swinging 60s London?

London Film Festival

The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.

Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s mid-west America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing.

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coen-ised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don’t muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons.

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.

His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by ^­ anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.

To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused.

It’s this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.)

The Coens, though, don’t quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there’s something very personal going on here.

It’s not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens’ own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik’s son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It’s  paid wonderful dividends.

London film festival: Stephen Poliakoff’s pre-second world war conspiracy thriller never zips the way it should, but it’s still a solid, old-school entertainment

There’s a decided whiff of the John Buchans to Glorious 39, a rollicking conspiracy thriller set in the run-up to the second world war. Glorious 39 gives us dotty aunts and dodgy spies, showbiz starlets and imperilled young firebrands. Here, one feels, is the sort of yarn that Alfred Hitchcock might have had fun with: he would have kept it crisp and witty and light on its toes. Writer-director Stephen Poliakoff elects to play it straight and keep it sober. This never zips the way it should.

For all that, Poliakoff’s film deals out a solid, old-school entertainment. Romola Garai stars as Anne Keyes, the adopted actor daughter of Bill Nighy’s venerable elder statesman. In the palatial grounds of their country estate, the talk is all of war and appeasement, Churchill and Chamberlain. Under the cool, watchful eye of Jeremy Northam’s Foreign Office spook, a sabre-rattling MP (David Tennant) urges action against Hitler and then abruptly winds up dead.

This, naturally, is Anne’s cue to turn Miss Marple. Her subsequent investigation uncovers a stash of incriminating recordings, conveniently tucked away in the family outhouse, and a previously overlooked reel of movie footage in which her doomed fellow actor (Hugh Bonneville) urges her to “listen to them again, Anne”. Bonneville doesn’t quite go on to tell her that “the real villain is … aarrrgh!” before dropping dead from a poison dart. But I’m guessing it was a close-run thing.

If Glorious 39 strains credibility in its owl-eyed pursuit of a dark and terrible truth, then the polished, committed performances from the likes of Garai and Nighy keep it part-way honest. But Poliakoff’s film also deserves credit for offering a tangential spotlight on the motives of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasers. In recent years Chamberlain has become adopted as a kind of cover-all bogeyman by neo-con pundits keen to justify the merits of “preventative war” on Iraq or Iran. Glorious 39 at least roots this argument in its proper historical context. It shows how the pacifist counsel of the Great War survivors was hijacked and twisted by rogue elements within the Tory government; a cabal of influential aristocrats that was determined to preserve the status quo at any cost.

Glorious 39 is generally diverting and mildly political; conservative with a lower-case c. It frolics in a land of idyllic hunting grounds, picturesque castles and hearty gatherings, and then lets the whole house of cards come tumbling down.

Clive Owen and Viggo Mortensen impress with their unsentimental portrayals of fatherhood, writes Jason Solomons

Scrabbling around for unifying themes at film festivals often feels like a forced journalistic device but the 53rd London film festival does seem to have plugged into fatherhood. Giving the most rounded performance of his career, Clive Owen starred in Scott Hicks’s beautiful film The Boys Are Back, playing a British sports journalist in Australia who, after his wife dies, is left to bring up two young sons alone.

Whenever men do the washing up in Hollywood films, it has to be in a comedy (Mr Mom, Daddy Day Care) while the death of a mother is usually the cue for violins (Stepmom), so it’s rather refreshing to find a film that handles the subject without turning into a soup of sentimentality. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Owen getting an Oscar nomination for The Boys Are Back, slogging it out with Colin Firth in A Single Man (which also played at the LFF) when the awards race hots up next year. Both are much-liked British actors who’ve never quite nailed awards-worthy roles before but who have built up much goodwill in Hollywood and the male-dominated voters in the best actor category do love films about men coming over all soft and sensitive.

The Boys Are Back is based on a memoir by former parliamentary sketch writer Simon Carr. As he told me at the film’s premiere last week: “The role of the father has been rather eclipsed in the last 30 years. He was seen as someone useless, sat on the sofa, just paying for everything. Thankfully, it’s being more subtly evaluated now.”

Curiously, almost the exact same line even occurs in two festival films. “I wish I was dead so I could be with Mummy,” says the little son to his father in both The Boys Are Back and in The Road, the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s book, and for which Viggo Mortensen is also likely to find himself among the future Oscar nominees (the LFF has been fertile breeding ground for these of late: Forest Whitaker, Imelda Staunton, Frank Langella and Mortensen himself, for Eastern Promises).

Mortensen’s father and young son journey through a blasted American landscape, evading bands of cannibals, a sort of latterday Abraham and Isaac as Mortensen wrestles with the moral quandary of whether his son would be better off dead. The film is beautifully, bleakly made by John Hillcoat but it feels more depressed than depressing, a one-note whinge, like being stuck in an asthmatic cloud.

Memoirs are also popular this year. An Education is based on one by journalist Lynn Barber and built into a lovely, witty screenplay by Nick Hornby, forming a canvas for the career-making performance by Carey Mulligan in the lead role, as a 16-year-old in 1961 Twickenham seduced by a debonair Jewish businessman (played by American actor Peter Sarsgaard). The design details and Mulligan are a constant delight and it was a joy to witness the blossoming of a genuinely gifted young actress.

While George Clooney‘s voice opened the festival in Fantastic Mr Fox – another film about a father’s relationship with his son – his presence continued in Up in the Air, by Jason Reitman. I’d heard encouraging things about this comedy, about a corporate man obsessed with clocking up gold loyalty card points and air miles as he travels America firing people. Alas, it was a disappointment, drably directed with no real feel for the soul-crushing architectural space of airports and hotels, captured so eerily in Patrick Stettner’s The Business of Strangers. Elsewhere, I was driven to the point of insanity by Jean Pierre Jeunet’s restless, unamusing comedy Micmacs, about Dany Boon and a group of rubbish-collecting Parisian oddballs (Les Wombles?) including a cook, a human cannonball and a contortionist, ganging up to humiliate some arms dealers.

I enjoyed Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, with the Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé as a Ghost Dog-type assassin who always orders “two espressos in separate cups”, while on a mission in Seville. It’s the director’s most Jarmuschian work for years and boasts the most eclectic cast of the festival: Gael García Bernal, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray.

The new British cinema strand was encouraging this year. Lindy Heymann’s Kicks had great energy and style and Tom Harper’s The Scouting Book for Boys also marked a significant directorial debut. A twisted Romeo and Juliet for the Skins generation (it was written by Skins scriptwriter Jack Thorne), set in a Norfolk caravan park, it starred Thomas Turgoose as monosyllabic David in mad love with his childhood friend Emily, played by Holly Grainger. Director Harper has an innate feel for space and landscape and the shots, captured by Robbie Ryan, of the pair running along caravan roofs were among the most exhilarating cinematic moments of a lively, constantly evolving festival.

Mugabe and the White African is a covertly-filmed documentary about a white Zimbabwean family’s stand against Robert Mugabe’s land reform campaign. Co-director Andrew Thompson reveals how the film was made against enormous odds

Michael Campbell is one of a handful of white farmers still left in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned land for redistribution to poor black Zimbabweans. Since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife among the majority of the country’s citizens. But Campbell, 74, refuses to back down. Our film, Mugabe and the White African, follows Campbell and his family’s unprecedented attempt to take Mugabe to an international court on charges of racial discrimination and violation of their human rights, against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections.

It was always our intention to make a really cinematic film, as well as a powerful documentary. So we needed to shoot on a large format: a departure from the hidden-camera news footage that more commonly comes out of Zimbabwe. Images and sound are so important in adding texture and layers to a place, and we wanted the audience to feel really immersed.

But having big cameras, a sound crew and proper recording devices did make it even harder to shoot in a country where filming is, to this day, banned (the only exception appears to be for al-Jazeera). We risked imprisonment or worse if caught – one reason why we get so little news coming out of the country. What makes our film special is that it offers the only insight the outside world has of what is going on behind Zimbabwe’s closed borders, of life lived under Mugabe’s regime.

We were filming during last year’s contested presidential elections, so security was even more tense than usual. On the ground this meant you couldn’t go far before you hit a roadblock manned by the interior security force. It was pretty hairy getting about. We always used different borders on each of the five trips, different transport, and I slept in different safe houses every night to keep moving. Our golden rule, which I was only forced to break once, was to always travel separately from the equipment.

We got away with it – just. After every trip there would be the inevitable knock on the door of Michael Campbell’s farm. The security forces were never more than two days behind me.

I’m quite used to working in hostile environments. I’ve previously made films in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Gaza. But filming in places like that is considerably more straightforward than shooting in Zimbabwe. In Gaza, the buck stops with Hamas. There, if you’ve got their blessing, you can stand on a street corner and film. In Zimbabwe you couldn’t. There was no rule of law. You were not supposed to be there, full stop. Zimbabwe was an infinitely scarier country to shoot in. You were never quite sure who was your friend or enemy. Mugabe had instilled such mistrust in people.  

One of the white farmers we followed said you could be standing in church with someone who, the next day, would turn up at your farm with an iron bar in his hand and a gang of armed thugs by his side. There was constant fear all over the country. It sounds odd to say it, but in Gaza people felt and looked happier. They smiled. Life went on. But in Zimbabwe, it had stopped. It was not like in the rest of Africa, where you could have people selling mangoes and tomatoes on the roadside; it was like a country that had shut down. There were just shadows. This was the picture in 2008 and, according to most reports, the situation has only worsened.

Zimbabwe is a former British colony, and so there’s a tendency to presume the white farmers shouldn’t be there. Part of what appealed to us about making this documentary is that it wrestles with some uncomfortable questions. At one point, Michael Campbell’s son-in-law, Ben Freeth, asks, “Can you be white and African?” Well can you be white and American, or black and American? Of course you can. Racism is a terrible thing, whether it’s perpetrated by whites or blacks.

This film is ultimately about human rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are universals we should all care about. Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible dictator, responsible for serious human rights abuses, and those who oppose the regime are abducted, beaten, tortured and killed.

And what does the world do? Currently, very little. African leaders seem loath to criticise one of their own and the west sits on the fence, paralysed by the fear of being called neo-colonialists or racists.

Zimbabweans need the west not to wobble on sanctions. They need them to stick to the stance that the power-sharing government, the so-called unity government, is anything but. It is a government of disunity that shouldn’t be formally acknowledged. To say that we in the west recognise the government in Zimbabwe would be a catastrophic mistake for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans trapped in their own country. It would send out all the wrong messages that Mugabe is someone we could do business with. If this film can go some way towards bringing to an outside audience the injustices going on inside Zimbabwe – and, more importantly, get something done about it – then I feel that we as film-makers will have succeeded.  

• Mugabe and the White African is showing at the Ritzy at 6.30pm tonight, as part of the London film festival