BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Eternal Breasts

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Kinuyo Tanaka is best known as the magnetic lead actress in numerous films by Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and others...

November 9, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Arch

+ pre-recorded intro by Tang Shu Shuen How radical Tang Shu Shuen’s period melodrama must have seemed in 1970, arriving in a Hong Kong film industry dominated by kung fu and opera films, and still...

November 9, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Stella

Notes from the US press book for ‘Stella’ Stella is a landmark in the history of the Greek drama for several important reasons. To begin with, it marks the film debut of one of Europe’s most exciti...

November 7, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

A Quiet Passion

The biopic is a difficult film to get right, all the more so when its subject is an artist whose significance was understood only after their death. The view from here – a vantage point that makes ...

November 7, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Penthesilea - Queen of the Amazons

Laura Mulvey on ‘Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons’ Peter’s and my shared love of Hollywood films had, from the earliest days of our relationship, been an integral part of our daily and our social ...

November 6, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Riddles of the Sphinx

‘A film like Riddles of the Sphinx is designed to separate form from content, so that the spectator is simultaneously aware of each.’ That is how, in 2002, Peter Wollen summed up one basic strategy...

November 4, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Laura Mulvey in Conversation

A towering presence in debates surrounding independent cinema, gender and psychoanalysis in film, classical Hollywood, writing and filmmaking, the author of the seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and ...

November 4, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Sunset Song

Terence Davies on ‘Sunset Song’ Sunset Song, Davies’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel, is partly a paean to a landscape and the changing seasons within it, and Davies a...

November 2, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Farewell My Concubine

+ introduction by Carol-Mei Barker, BFI Programme Lead for Schools and Specialist in Chinese Cinema Covering much the same historical period as The Last Emperor, and with much the same Steadicam s...

November 2, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Far from Heaven

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Todd Haynes has managed, surprisingly successfully, to build different levels of audience access into Far from Heaven, almost like t...

November 2, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

High School

The screening on Thursday 13 November will include a discussion about Frederick Wiseman’s aesthetics and approach with filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman and curator Matthew Barrington Although some ...

November 1, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

The Deep Blue Sea

In his centenary year, dramatist Terence Rattigan, long considered the outmoded epitome of bourgeois English theatre, has again become fashionable, with a spate of West End revivals. His new modish...

November 1, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Breaking the Waves

Lars von Trier on ‘Breaking the Waves’ Breaking the Waves has taken five years and four million pounds to realise. Where did the original idea for the film come from? I prefer to work with unassa...

November 1, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Titicut Follies

How does Titicut Follies stand up today? Its effect is still devastating. Were the film a muck-raking exposé, it might now seem merely a dated document. But Wiseman is beyond self-righteous anger o...

October 29, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

Spring in a Small Town

Fei Mu is considered part of the Second Generation of Chinese filmmakers, memorably captured in Centre Stage (aka Ruan Lingyu, 1991), Stanley Kwan’s biopic of actress Ruan Lingyu. The Second Genera...

October 29, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Passion of Remembrance + Step Forward Youth

Almost 40 years after it was first made, the Sankofa collective’s The Passion of Remembrance remains salient. The film is a grand tapestry filled with allusions to the intersectional concerns, moti...

October 29, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Remembering Terence Davies

We are pleased to announce Mark Kermode will be joined by actors Debi Jones and Ann Mitchell, cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, producers Sol Papadopoulos, Roy Boulter and Sean O’Connor, writer ...

October 28, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The Long Day Closes

The screening on Wednesday 19 November will be introduced by season curator Ben Roberts ‘This is the last of the autobiographical films I shall do; perhaps I’ve changed. When I was that young, tho...