The BFI’s London Film Festival have unleashed their programme for this year’s edition, and as well as offering a bumper programme of regular features, shorts, experimental works and newly restored archive treasures, they’re building a temporary 800 seat theatre to home more film fans in the capital. The 2016 edition takes a special focus on diversity, directing the annual Network @ LFF for emerging filmmakers specifically towards minority entrants, opening with Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom, and closes with the commencement of the BFI’s three month focus on black actors – Black Star.

Announcing the programme, BFI Chief Amanda Nevill proclaimed that “there’s no Brexit at this festival.” Following this, she added “this is what the BFI and the LFF does, it’s a cultural coming together of hearts and minds around the world.” Slightly grandiose perhaps, but it is the essence of what film festivals do. Whether this will translate into more focus on quality films and less red-carpet extravagance is not yet clear, but judging from the depth and breadth of the programme’s offering, it is possible. Here’s five films you might not have thought about to check out during the October festival.

Porto (Gabe Klinger)

Porto, the second feature and first fiction film from critic turned director Gabe Klinger is one of the less well known films in the programme but one well worth getting excited about. Klinger’s first film, Double Play about the relationship between filmmakers James Benning and Richard Linklater, two men whose approach to cinema is very different but who share a great many other things, including a love of baseball, was an understated, smart piece of documentary filmmaking, and there is every reason to believe he can transition to fiction well too. Porto centres on a life-changing one-night encounter in the Portuguese city of the title, has Jim Jarmusch as Executive Producer, and Anton Yelchin and Lucie Lucas in the lead roles. These things, and the fact that it’s one of the few films in the festival screening from 35mm, should be enough to pique interest.

Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)

French LGBT orientated director Alain Guiraudie, though eight features in, only really got major attention for his last film, the wonderfully low key gay cruising thriller Stranger By The Lake, a film that Cahiers du Cinema named as their best of the year and saw Guiraudie take the directing prize at Cannes. This follow up hasn’t been received with quite the same warmth at previous festival screenings, but it does sound very interesting. A meandering, elliptical character comedy broken up with outbursts of graphic sexuality, surrealism and violence, it seems difficult to get a handle on, but representative of a director willing to experiment and push boundaries. Staying Vertical plays at the end of the festival.

The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)

The fourth in a sort of polyptych surrounding legendary or mythical figures, Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV casts Jean-Pierre Léaud as the long-ruling French monarch. An unpredictable, unclassifiable slow cinema maverick, Albert Serra’s last three films (The Story of My Death, about Casanova, Birdsong, a re-staging of the journey of the Magi, and Honor of the Knights, Serra’s own Don Quixote story) confused and delighted in equal measure. There is no reason to believe this elaborate, sumptuous looking follow up won’t do the same.

Manchester By The Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)

Playwright and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan first directed his own work with the underseen, underrated You Can Count On Me in 2000. His next directorial feature, Margaret, didn’t come until 2011, following a lengthy and bitter battle over the material with the studios. Due to come out in 2007, the film was all but dumped by Fox Searchlight on its 2011 release after Lonergan fought lawsuits to get a cut he was happy with onto screens, the studio imposing an arbitrary 150 minute length restriction on him. Even the botched 150 minute version of the film that did appear was masterful. His Kyle Chandler and Casey Affleck starring  follow up comes with great expectation. which judging from it’s Sundance premiere Lonergan seems to have met. A $10 million acquisition from Amazon Studios after the festival for US distribution may also have done a little to ease the wounds from Lonergan’s previous interactions with studios. Manchester By The Sea is a Headline Gala at LFF.

Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang)

One of the most interesting screenings in the great looking Treasures strand of the festival that showcases the BFI’s newly restored archive material and classic films, this 1954 Thai film is described in the LFF programme as if “Douglas Sirk made a Thai Buddhist melodrama,” which is quite an enticing proposition. Long believed to be a lost film, a negative of Santi-Vina was recently found in the BFI archives and restored in Italy. Be amongst the first to see it outside of Thailand at LFF.

The BFI London Film Festival runs from the 6th to the 15th of October. Browse the full programme.