BFI Southbank Programme Notes

My Name Is Pauli Murray

+ Pre-recorded Q&A Pauli Murray knew intimately what it meant to live a life that was out of sync – when even language wasn’t sufficient to define or describe a journey. Lawyer, professor, po...

June 6, 2021 | SHEFFIELD DOC/FEST 2021

The Beatles and India

+ Q&A with directors The Beatles and India is a unique historical chronicle of the enduring love affair between The Beatles and India that started more than half a century ago. Rare archival...

June 6, 2021 | TONGUES ON FIRE UK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

Lift like a Girl

+ Pre-recorded Q&A On a corner-lot in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, female weightlifters train to become Olympic champions. Following in the footsteps of some of Egypt’s most famous athletes...

June 5, 2021 | SHEFFIELD DOC/FEST 2021

Fool for Love

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. It’s impossible not to see this adaptation of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in relation to his script for Paris, Texas, and difficul...

June 5, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Buffalo Bill and the Indians

In the preface to his play Indians, on which Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians is loosely based, Arthur Kopit notes how, during rewritings between the London and Broadway openings, he evolved f...

June 5, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

What's Love Got to Do with It

In a genre famous for bungles and mediocrities, Brian Gibson’s biopic of Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do with It, works on every level. This is partly because it has advantages which counterbal...

June 4, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

+ Pre-recorded Q&A In the summer of 1969, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). After that summer, the footage was largely forgotten – until now...

June 4, 2021 | SHEFFIELD DOC/FEST 2021

The Man Who Wasn't There

In October 1942, Raymond Chandler wrote a letter to Blanche Knopf, wife and associate of his American publisher, in which he described his resentment at having ‘to ride around on [Dashiell] Hammett...

June 4, 2021 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Gunda

Where his prior film, the acclaimed epic Aquarela, was a reminder of the fragility of human tenure on earth, in Gunda, master filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky reminds us that we share our planet with b...

June 4, 2021 | NEW RELEASES AND RE-RELEASES

20 Feet from Stardom

‘Singing background remains a somewhat unheralded position… But that walk to the front is complicated. It’s a conceptual leap,’ opines Bruce Springsteen, kicking off director Morgan Neville’s exub...

June 4, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

Thieves like Us

The 35mm print of this film is sadly now too colour faded to present so we will be screening this film from a video format. We apologise for any disappointment. At the beginning of his 1949 adapt...

June 3, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

The director of Nashville, A Wedding, The Perfect Couple is dead. Long live the director of 3 Women, Quintet – and Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Well, not exactly… In the st...

June 3, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

A Perfect Couple

Not uncharacteristically of Altman, A Perfect Couple grew out of the jetsam of his professional life: in this case, a desire to further explore Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin (who had played small pa...

June 1, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Images

Altman on ‘Images’ Robert Altman was in London in February, cutting his new film, Images. To help audiences to stop thinking of him as the man who made MASH (and to forestall their indignation wh...

June 1, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

Mavis!

‘Mavis gets a little rough sometimes,’ Bob Dylan once said of the young Mavis Staples, according to the woman herself. He was referring to the unexpected grittiness in Staples’s singing voice, one...

May 31, 2021 | HER VOICE - BLACK WOMEN FROM THE SPOTLIGHT TO THE SCREEN

Broadcast News

With a pre-recorded introduction by director Sarah Smith (30 May only). Twenty-four years on, this witty, whip-smart rom-com following the fraught TV newsroom love triangle of Holly Hunter’s perky...

May 30, 2021 | DREAM PALACE - THE FILMS THAT CINEMAS WERE BUILT FOR

Brewster McCloud

Brewster McCloud registers as an honourable failure: a species of crazed doodling with all the awkward, endearing earmarks of a promising ‘first’ film, in which a director tries to do and say every...

May 30, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

That Cold Day in the Park

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Robert Altman had been working as a director for close to 20 years before he had a big hit with MASH (1970), and he followed that co...

May 29, 2021 | ROBERT ALTMAN - AMERICAN OUTSIDER

The James Dean Story

After an inauspicious first feature (The Delinquents, which Altman preferred not to be screened), he co-directed this rather poetic documentary portrait of the life and character of the star and cu...