Clare Stewart on the London Film Festival: shorter, bigger, bolder So this year cinemas in Islington, Bethnal Green and Hackney will screen festival films. By thus shifting its epicentre, the LFF will be following London's cultural drift eastwards - another example of the Olympic dividend. Stewart says this year's LFF can boast "a handful" more films, and more crucially an 18 per cent increase in seats to sell and a 40 per cent increase in "prime-time" (weekend and evening) screenings. The programme looks agreeable, too. It starts on a light, charming note, with Tim Burton's 3D stop-motion animation film Frankenweenie, a cute take on the Frankenstein story, about a young boy who finds a way to bring his pet dog back to life. Another big attraction is Crossfire Hurricane, an authorised documentary about the Rolling Stones, who will attend the premiere. This event will be beamed live to some 200 UK cinemas. Other gala films include Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, a thriller with comic touches about the freeing of six US Embassy staff in 1979 Iran; Quartet, the bittersweet directing debut of Dustin Hoffman, about the inhabitants of a retirement home for ex-opera singers; and The Sessions, a tender, highly rated drama about a paralysed man (John Hawkes) and a sex surrogate (Helen Hunt). Then there are the event screenings: The Manxman, Hitchcock's penultimate silent feature from 1929, rarely seen, but a perfect climax to BFI Southbank's remarkable summer-long Hitchcock season; and David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia, given a brand-new digital restoration. Stewart, a cheerful, ebullient women who dresses in colourful clothes and talks fast, emphasising her points with hand gestures, seems the type to shake things up a little. She has done so by categorising films in this year's programme with buzzwords: Dare, Love, Debate, Laugh, Journey, Sonic. This may sound like some outlandish idea hatched by Perfect Curve, the achingly hip but clueless PR company featured in the BBC Olympic mockumentary Twenty Twelve. But Stewart insists there's a sound rationale behind it. "We've studied reports on what makes people choose to see movies," she says. It seems that what a film is about and its genre are more important than its stars, word of mouth and, dare I say it, reviews. So we started to think: are we [as a festival] presenting films in a way that helps people work that out? Then it was important to come up with sections that were enticing, flexible, and allowed us to be surprising about what we might include. Love is not just romance, for example, so let's give them other angles [on that word]. Stewart is looking forward to opening night - and is tickled pink by one little detail that she helped to make happen, concerning Mick Jagger and his colleagues. "Everyone was wondering if the Stones would show up for the closing night of the Olympics," she laughs. They didn't - but we got them! Booking opens today for the 56th BFI London Film Festival (www.bfi.org.uk/lff), in partnership with American Express. The festival runs Oct 10-21