BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Terence Davies makes films in instalments. The 100-minute Trilogy – Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration – which was begun in 1976 took eight years to complete. It won the 1984 BF...

October 23, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Crooklyn

In an article for Sight and Sound, cultural theorist bell hooks famously referred to Crooklyn as a failure of ‘counter-hegemonic representation’. Originally pitched to mainstream audiences as a fam...

October 22, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Camila

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. A contemporary review Camila gains much of its power from the circumstances of its production. Its story of a tragic love affair be...

October 22, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Terence Davies Trilogy

The screening on Tuesday 21 October will be introduced by season curator Ben Roberts In 1977, as new students at the National Film School, the first thing we had to do was watch one another’s fil...

October 21, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Enamorada

We’re delighted to confirm this screening will be of the BFI Archive’s brand new 35mm print made with funding from the National Lottery and the additional support of donors to our Keep Film on Film...

October 21, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

7th Heaven

The screening at the [2018] BFI London Film Festival of Frank Borzage’s 1927 masterpiece 7th Heaven in a new restoration was cause for rejoicing. But Borzage, who directed movies from 1913 to the e...

October 20, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Brief Encounter

The 80th Anniversary screening on Sunday 16 November will include a discussion with theatre director Emma Rice, filmmaker Barnaby Thompson and writer Oliver Soden SPOILER WARNING The following not...

October 20, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Counsellor

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. As Chekhov famously remarked, ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired...

October 1, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

The Last Duel

A concern for truth lies at the heart of Sir Ridley Scott’s new epic film The Last Duel and it follows a thin red line connecting all his period films from The Duellists (1977) to Robin Hood (2010)...

September 29, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Missing Believed Wiped
Associated-Rediffusion Special

Studio 5 The opening of Associated-Rediffusion’s Studio 5 was a BIG deal. So big that the opening itself was televised and we were given a guided tour of the studio and a look at the rehearsals for...

September 27, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Ready Steady Go!

In the early 1960s, as pop music became the vanguard of a newly developing and revolutionary artistic and cultural movement, television producers began to tackle the task of inventing a format to c...

September 26, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

The Ice Storm

With its spare, circular story line, the ability to crystallise so much of what it is about in its visuals, and an exceptional cast delivering the most precise of spoken lines, The Ice Storm is cin...

September 26, 2025 | Re-releases

Captive Cinema

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television Shaking up the world of TV documentary, the features department of Associated-Rediffusion was the subject of the first TV season at the Natio...

September 23, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Drama 3 - The Classics at Associated-Rediffusion

As an original ITV company, in the early years Associated-Rediffusion mined the classical theatre canon for many of its TV dramas. It has left us a fascinating historical legacy, acclaimed 1960s ac...

September 20, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Matchstick Men

‘People are fascinated with con men like they’re fascinated with mobsters – at least the fictional kind,’ says novelist Eric Garcia, whose manuscript for Matchstick Men was being considered for the...

September 16, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

The Lost World of Children’s Programming

+ intro by Elinor Groom, Curator of Television This programme includes Television for Children, a featurette made exclusively for the NFT, which follows a version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the...

September 16, 2025 | Associated-Rediffusion
The UK’s First Groundbreaking TV Franchise

Gladiator

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica imperiously dismisses the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius as ‘an historically overrated figur...

September 13, 2025 | Ridley Scott
Building Cinematic Worlds

Alien

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The ...