Artistic director of the London Film Festival steps down

Sandra Hebron, artistic director of the London Film Festival stepped down after the closing of this year’s festival. She ran the festival for 9 years and transformed it into an international success.

In an interview with IndieWire, Hebron revealed how she felt it was time to move on. She had been working at the BFI for 15 years and while the festival has been growing over the past several years, she felt that it was the right time. Looking at this year’s success, and the diversity of films screened at the festival, she couldn’t have picked a better time to step down.

This year the London Film Festival became a much bigger presence in the film festival circuit partly because of it’s strong film selection mixed with celebrity appearances, but also because of it’s support of talented young filmmakers and its direction online. Film festivals are constantly looking for ways to attain audiences and what I think the BFI have done really well is to make their festival accessible. It’s well organized, their website makes it easy to find out what's happening and it has the panache to go even higher. London is after all a major culture capital, and it makes sense to have a major film festival that showcases British talent as well as international filmmakers.

What will happen in 2012? We will have to wait and see what artistic direction the festival takes next.