BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Meadow

In a large room in an 18th century villa cluttered with coloured pictures and posters, and patchwork and papier-mâché puppets, a waif-like, girlish figure is conducting a lesson on film animation w...

March 3, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

In the Cut

In one of In the Cut’s early scenes, English professor Frannie is teaching her students about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. They look bored, apathetic. One complains that all that happens in ...

March 3, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Walkabout

Nic Roeg’s masterpiece details the growing bond between an indigenous Australian boy, on a ritual separation from his tribe, and two white children lost in the outback. Beautifully shot, it inspire...

March 2, 2024 | JOHN BARRY
SOUNDTRACKING BOND AND BEYOND

Special People

+ Q&A with director Justin Edgar and actors Dominic Coleman & David Proud Enlisted to teach a class of wheelchair-users about filmmaking, neurotic Jasper gets a little more than he barga...

March 2, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING
BUSTING THE BIAS

The Night of the Shooting Stars

La notte di San Lorenzo, like the Taviani brothers’ previous films, belongs to a cinema of rhetoric. The overall structure is loose, defined in broad strokes that can be grasped immediately and the...

March 2, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

Jules et Jim

In 1912, Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) and the Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) become firm friends, happily sharing their enjoyment of Paris, art, literature and women, even when their adoration of the...

March 2, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Good Morning Babylon

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. In contrast to that movie radicalism which springs from some marriage of Marx and Hollywood, the Tavianis belong to a solid, mature,...

March 2, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

Going to Mars - The Nikki Giovanni Project

+ Q&A with Chanje Kunda, Bianca Wilson and host Chardine Taylor-Stone This life-affirming, award-winning documentary follows legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, aged 80, as she looks b...

March 2, 2024 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Doctor Who
The Celestial Toymaker

The making of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ Brian Hayles would write many Doctor Who stories and is best remembered for creating the Martian Ice Warriors and the planet and civilisation of Peladon. But ...

March 2, 2024 | Preview

The Subversives

This early drama interweaves the stories of four men with complex personal lives (one of whom is a film director) and political affiliations, linked by their presence at a – real-life – public figu...

March 1, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

Perfect Days

The 21st-century fiction filmmaking career of Wim Wenders has been exasperating for fans of the early work of wonderment and charm that made him a pillar of the New German cinema in the 1970s and 8...

March 1, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Evil Does Not Exist

The love for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, which won an Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2022, can feel like a dream. Needless to say, Hamaguchi’s refraction of Chekhov endures, ...

March 1, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Devil in a Blue Dress

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Carl Franklin’s elegant, intelligent adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel centres on Second World War veteran Easy Rawlins, hired to ...

March 1, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Blue Black Permanent

+ intro by BFI events programmer Aga Baranowska and filmmaker and curator Peter Todd Blue Black Permanent was Margaret Tait’s first and only feature production. Although her abstract animations an...

March 1, 2024 | REGULAR PROGRAMME

Ben Nicholson 1894-1982

+ intro by Steve Foxon, Curator of Non-Fiction, BFI National Archive An account of the life and work of the English painter Ben Nicholson, with reminiscences from the artist Patrick Heron, who too...

February 28, 2024 | ART IN THE MAKING

The Dreamers

+ Q&A with producer Jeremy Thomas Gilbert Adair on ‘The Dreamers’ The novel on which my screenplay for The Dreamers is based was originally published in 1988 under the title The Holy Innocents...

February 27, 2024 | UK PREMIERE OF 4K RESTORATION

Oska Bright Film Festival 2024 First Look

The Cunning The Oska Bright team is delighted to share this selection of highlights ahead of the festival. The festival will explore aspects of the human condition past and present, encompassing...

February 26, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

Caesar Must Die

A contemporary review The Taviani brothers, arthouse darlings of the 70s and 80s (Allonsanfàn, Padre padrone, The Night of San Lorenzo), have rather dropped off the international map in recent year...

February 24, 2024 | MAGICAL REALISM
THE FILM FABLES OF THE TAVIANI BROTHERS

Boom

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Set on a secluded island, Boom introduced a new, minimal ‘music box’ sound that Barry frequently used in the years immediately befor...

February 24, 2024 | JOHN BARRY
SOUNDTRACKING BOND AND BEYOND

City of God

In 2002, the Cannes Film Festival was crackling with buzz, about a film that wasn’t in the official competition, was a completely unknown entity, yet was building up a frenzied word of mouth. It wo...

February 23, 2024 | RE-RELEASES