The Times bfi 48th London Film Festival : 20 October - 4 November 2004

The countdown to The Times bfi 48th London Film Festival has begun, with less than 4 weeks until our Opening Night Gala, Mike Leigh's award winning Vera Drake

The Gala section screens European and UK premieres including Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, the visually arresting martial arts tale House of Flying Daggers and Mira Nair's Vanity Fair. Closing Night Gala is I Heart Huckabees - a brilliant 'existential' comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert and Jude Law.

Sky Movies Film on the Square has all of the best new film releases screening in London's buzzing Leicester Square. You can see works by Lukas Moodysson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonathan Demme, Woody Allen, Danny Boyle, Ousmane Sembene and Gregg Araki.

Ntl: New British Cinema strand offers the best of home-grown cinema and portrays life in contemporary Britain; from Tracey Emin's debut feature Top Spot, to Bullet Boy - starring So Solid Crew's Asher D - a story of two black brothers growing up in inner-city London and a timely damning of gun crime.

French Revolutions is your opportunity to see the best in new French cinema. Ma Mère, an adaptation of Georges Bataille's provocative novel, starring Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel, and My Father is an Engineer, Robert Guédiguian's latest ensemble piece based in Marseilles are sure to be highlights.

The finest contemporary European films will be shown in the Cinema Europa section. Look out for the ultimate wheelchair road movie, Aaltra a deliciously mordant black comedy and Czech Dream, a funny and provocative analysis of the world of contemporary media manipulation based on a hoax perpetrated by two film students.

The World Cinema section includes such gems as the Cannes Prix du Jury award winner Tropical Malady, and Women's Love, from the director regarded as Egypt's answer to Pedro Almodovar, which is a blend of Friends, Sex and the City and Bollywood.

In th eExperimenta programme, experience some of the most original and vital film-making of recent times including Dealer, an impressive Hungarian feature about the uncompromising story of a day in the life of a drug dealer.

Finally, the Festival also offers over 130 shorts and animations from across the globe, classic gems from the Archive strand and a series of Events and Masterclasses.