Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

The Tiger of Eschnapur

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In 1958 West German producer Artur Brauner offered Fritz Lang the opportunity to make a new film based on Das Indische Grabmal, scri...

Memories of Murder

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Memories of Murder is based on a series of unsolved murders that took place between 1986-91 in provincial South Korea: ten women wer...

Duckweed (aka Floating Weeds)

Part of the Eleven Women TV series, Duckweed marked Edward Yang’s directorial debut following his return to Taiwan. Co-producers Sylvia Chang and Chen Chun-tian envisioned a platform for emerging t...

Nope

In the wake of the success of Get Out and Us, both of which disrupted and redefined the horror genre in singular ways, Jordan Peele was eager to expand his cinematic canvas, embrace a challenge unl...

The Harder They Fall

Writer/director Jeymes Samuel on ‘The Harder They Fall’ You wrote and directed the 50-minute western They Die by Dawn in 2013, but this is your debut proper as writer-director. What draws you to t...

Her

‘It’s about falling in love with an AI, yet the film makes you feel so human in all its painful and blissful ways.’ – Leah K, BFI Member Spike Jonze’s vision of the near future makes its Californi...

La Captive

A contemporary review La Captive is a film like no other currently on London’s screens, but if the director’s name, Chantal Akerman, puts you in mind of an avant-garde, confrontationally feminist c...

A Confucian Confusion

The Chinese title of A Confucian Confusion, Edward Yang’s first comedy, is Duli Shidai, which means ‘Time of Independence’ and also means that it’s calculated to raise government hackles in Taiwan....

Nuit et jour

Nuit et jour confirms the themes and ideas that have concerned Chantal Akerman over almost 20 years of filmmaking. Yet, in some ways, it can be seen as a capitulation to commercialism, a turning aw...

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Haunting … it seems that in writing on Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, one cannot help but invoke this at once nebulous, yet appropriate description of the film’s aesthetic and affective force...

Love & Basketball

Director and screenwriter Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote the original screenplay for Love & Basketball while taking a sabbatical from her six years of writing various television series, including ...

La Folie Almayer

Chantal Akerman’s final narrative film, this hypnotic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel encountered unusual difficulties finding theatrical release – particularly surprising considering Akerman’s...

Posse

Posse is a saga of the wild and untamed West about a tight-knit bunch of outlaws who ride together and fight together, seizing justice where it is not given and carving out their niche on the Ameri...

Toute une nuit

Toute une nuit is made up entirely of a series of fragments. While apparently unconnected, they are all similar in tone. These amorous comings and goings, some happy, some unhappy, are all marked b...

No Home Movie

No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman’s final film, is both a veering departure from the trajectory of her recent work and completely of a piece with what had come before. Where her last feature, Almayer’...

Buck and the Preacher

Among the more successful elements of Jordan Peele’s flawed, ambitious space-cowboy foray Nope (2022) is the film’s intelligent engagement with cinema history and visual culture. A particularly sig...

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

With Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, her most accessible and ‘commercial’ film to date, Chantal Akerman will presumably reach a much wider public than hitherto (the film was the success of the 1978 Paris F...

Histoires d’Amérique

American Stories is not the first time Chantal Akerman has travelled to New York with her camera. Once again she is in search of an identity, that of a Jew and an immigrant, the universal family hi...

Golden Eighties

Shopping precincts are as good an indication as any of our moral condition. Just as the Passage Choiseul, where in the early years of the century Céline’s anti-hero watched his parents sinking deep...

News from Home

News from Home is a film shot in New York. The images are of New York. The soundtrack is partly composed of letters my mother sent me from Brussels. They’re love letters. My mother was asking when ...