Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

District B13

+ intro by Chee Keong Cheung, writer, director, producer and CEO of Action Xtreme (Wednesday 20 November only) This dystopian actioner follows the same blueprint as the earlier Taxi: a cop and a c...

Year Zero - The Silent Death of Cambodia + Breaking the Silence - Truth and Lies in the War on Terror

John Pilger’s shocking 1979 documentary Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia alerted the world to the horrors wrought by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had come to power in the turmoil followi...

Polite Society

+ Q&A with director Nida Manzoor 16-year-old Ria is an aspiring stuntwoman, dreaming of her future excelling in the film business while her older sister Lena becomes a world famous artist. But...

Bird

Andrea Arnold’s return to her British social-realist roots is warm, exuberant and absolutely soars. Twelve-year-old Bailey is a tomboy who lives in a busy squat in North Kent with Bug, her young fa...

Lousy Little Sixpence + Utopia

+ pre-recorded intro by Dr Alec Morgan and statement from Amy McQuire Lousy Little Sixpence: why the film was made Open any volume of Australian history and try to find any reference to William Co...

Face/Off

The original tagline of John Woo’s outlandish, high-octane masterpiece read, ‘In order to trap him, he must become him’. That doesn’t come close to capturing the full insanity of this film, which s...

Point Break

Production on Point Break began on 9 July 1990, some three years after the project was first developed. Of the long gestation period for the film, producers Robert L. Levy and Peter Abrams note, ‘W...

The Golden Dream

Ken Loach’s influence may not be so prevalent in current UK filmmaking, but turn to the Spanish-speaking world and he remains a key reference point for a number of directors forging tough, angry, s...

Red Cliff

‘An Asian Troy’ is how John Woo describes the Manichean power struggles that gripped China at the end of the Han Dynasty, as recounted in the 14th-century literary classic Romance of the Three King...

Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy + Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002)

John Pilger introduced his 1994 East Timor film at BFI Southbank as follows: At Stanfords in London’s Covent Garden, reputedly the best map shop in the world, I asked for a map of the island of Ti...

The Woman King

+ intro by Rógan Graham, freelance writer and film programmer (Friday 1 November only) Viola Davis is magnificent as General Nanisca, leader of the Agoji, the all-female army responsible for prote...

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

‘Nothing can defeat the human spirit’ – Toby Kearton, BFI Member The question of what constitutes mental illness, how to depict it and the proper attitude towards it, was Milos Forman’s biggest ch...

A Girl at My Door

Writer-director July Jung on ‘A Girl at My Door’ A Girl at My Door is your first feature film: how did the meeting with producer Lee Changdong ( Poetry , Secret Sunshine ) go and how did you convi...

Color Adjustment

This ground-breaking, critically acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning documentary, narrated by Ruby Dee, examines the representation of race in a selection of US television’s most popular shows, (in...

Anora

A certain minority of viewers has at times imagined a version of Pretty Woman (1990) in which Richard Gere’s car does not pull up near Julia Roberts’ sensitive striver Vivian, but next to Laura San...

Save the Green Planet!

This one-of-a-kind, completely insane film follows a disillusioned conspiracy theorist who believes that aliens have infiltrated society and plan to destroy Earth during the next lunar eclipse. He’...

No Other Land

No documentarist could reasonably expect their work to change the world overnight. But for the makers of No Other Land, the process involved is a much longer one: this collective, two Palestinians,...

Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein challenged cinematic form in his second film, an essential revolutionary classic. Dramatising the true story of the mutiny aboard the Potemkin, the filmmaker integrated bold imagery wi...

The War You Don't See

John Pilger: Why are wars not reported honestly? In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a ‘war of perception … conducted ...

Taxi

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. This furiously fast and funny action flic flick kick-started one of the most successful franchises in French film history. A non-dri...