BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Bye Bye Love

+ recorded intro by director Isao Fujisawa The young man who calls himself Utamaro (after the painter) is on the street, phoning the girlfriend he’s been living with, when he’s dumped. His reactio...

April 28, 2024 | QUEER EAST FESTIVAL

Summer Vacation 1999

+ intro by writer and film curator Ren Scateni Shusuke Kaneko on ‘Summer Vacation 1999’ It’s very hard to explain where the idea for Summer Vacation 1999 came from. I did set out wanting to make ...

April 26, 2024 | QUEER EAST FESTIVAL

Omen

+ intro and Q&A with director Baloji Tomisin Adepeju will be hosting a post-screening discussion with Baloji. Their conversation will interrogate the film’s textured exploration of grief, cult...

April 26, 2024 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS PRESENTS

Nezouh

+ Q&A with director Soudade Kaadan Soudade Kaadan on ‘Nezouh’ Nezouh is not a conventional film about Syrian refugees. How did you come up with this unique metaphorical approach? At the time...

April 25, 2024 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA PREVIEW

El sur

Victor Erice’s second feature is a powerful evocation of the imagination’s capacity to craft crepuscular worlds filled with hushed, secretive voices. But it is also a warning about the dangers of...

April 22, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

Saving Face

With a recorded introduction from Jinghua Qian, writer and critic Saving Face is the first feature directed by Alice Wu. Featuring a cast made up of primarily Chinese-American actors from the New ...

April 21, 2024 | QUEER EAST FESTIVAL

The Teachers' Lounge

Teachers are having a tough time. Between underfunded institutions, potential union strikes, and paranoia about pupils being ‘corrupted’, the thankless roles of educators have been put under increa...

April 19, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Great Expectations

Great Expectations was the first of David Lean’s two adaptations of Dickens classics (Oliver Twist followed in 1948). Lean realised the cinematic potential of the novel more skilfully than his pred...

April 17, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Michael Palin in Nigeria

+ Q&A with Michael Palin, chaired by Ronke Phillips-Pakenham. Michael Palin in Nigeria is a new three-part 1,300-mile journey series with broadcaster and writer Michael Palin, as he visits thi...

April 15, 2024 | TV PREVIEW

The Sweet East

In a 1985 article for the New York Times, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson comments on a perceived lack of ‘political seriousness’ in the work of many American artists, a failu...

April 12, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Ratcatcher

Set in and around a Glasgow tenement block during a dustmen’s strike in the mid-’70s, Ramsay’s marvellous first feature centres on a 12-year-old (Eadie) who, haunted by a secret, retreats into a pr...

April 12, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

Close Your Eyes

Víctor Erice’s first feature in three decades is a characteristically ambitious, richly satisfying meditation on memory, identity, family, friendship… and cinema. Twenty years after an actor’s myst...

April 12, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

The Last of the Mohicans

Michael Mann on ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ Do you see Hawkeye in the same terms as the protagonists of your earlier films, Thief or Manhunter , as someone who, due to his special abilities, is coe...

April 5, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Pather Panchali

Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ray’s film is one of the most extraordinary feature debuts ever made. It follows the everyday lives of an imp...

April 2, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Wonka

What’s it about? Young Willy Wonka arrives in Europe full of drive and ambition. Despite his having an incredible product, the rival chocolatiers and an unscrupulous laundry owner take advantage of...

March 31, 2024 | FAMILIES

The Leopard

The casting of Burt Lancaster in the title role threatened to poison the production from the very beginning, since Goffredo Lombardo, head of the production company Titanus, had made the decision t...

March 31, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Passport to Pimlico

By general consent the best of writer T.E.B. Clarke’s six Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico arguably best exemplifies studio head Michael Balcon’s description of Ealing’s post-war films as ‘our ...

March 30, 2024 | MEMBER PICKS

Silver Haze

‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,’ runs the quote – usually misattributed to Plato – that pops up in email signatures, motivational posters and countless memes. It’s a sent...

March 29, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

After Hours

It’s hard to believe now, but Martin Scorsese was once on the outs in Hollywood. Today, his passion projects command blockbuster budgets; 40 years ago, however, The King of Comedy (1982) had just b...

March 29, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The most ready defence of director Albert Lewin is that he was ahead of his time. In the 50s and 60s, the question of what he had to do with cinema or cinema to do with him created a sense of inass...

March 28, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS