BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Alexandria Again and Forever

Now an ageing director, Yehia becomes infatuated with star actor Amr, which threatens to damage their professional relationship and fuel his depression and writer’s block. But a fateful meeting dur...

July 23, 2023 | DRAMA AND DESIRE
THE FILMS OF YOUSSEF CHAHINE

Passing Through

+ intro and Q&A with journalist and broadcaster Kevin Le Gendre and musician Tony Kofi Larry Clark on ‘Passing Through’ What led you to make Passing Through? I had finished As Above, So Bel...

July 22, 2023 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Once Upon a Time
A Disney Day

Dive deeper into the fascinating history of the Disney studio in this afternoon of richly illustrated talks and discussions, including a session from the Fantasy/Animation podcast. Our expert speak...

July 22, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Beauty and the Beast

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is a tale of transformation, narrated in the overtly stylised fashion of Broadway. Accounts of the film’s production tend to foreground not directors Kirk Wise and Gar...

July 22, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Barbie

Greta Gerwig on ‘Barbie’ On making Barbie… Barbie has so much recognition, so much love, and of course a 60-plus-year history, which was exciting for me. As a writer and a director, I’m always lo...

July 21, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Lady Bird

Lady Bird is a coming-of-age film, set in Sacramento, California, Greta Gerwig’s birthplace, during the early 2000s. ‘Lady Bird’ is the name adopted by the heroine, a 17-year-old girl at a Catholic...

July 17, 2023 | FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS
THE FILMS OF GRETA GERWIG

Hocus Pocus

Young Max and his family move to Salem. On Halloween night, he inadvertently brings back to life a trio of malevolent sibling witches who, in order to live forever, have to carry out a heinous act....

July 16, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

An Egyptian Story

In order to grasp the conditions in which the equation of a non-occidental film director has to be worked out, it is necessary to take the following factors into account: the authorities of his cou...

July 16, 2023 | DRAMA AND DESIRE
THE FILMS OF YOUSSEF CHAHINE

WALL-E

NB: The short BURN-E will screen after the feature. In the future, Earth has been evacuated and rubbish-collecting robots prepare the planet for the return of humankind. With the passage of time,...

July 15, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Tron

A contemporary review The much-publicised gimmick that sets Tron apart in the current science-fiction wave is that much of its geography and hardware was created by computer and, unlike the miniatu...

July 15, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Mistress America

Having been rounded on for their hipster artisanal obsessions and their morally dubious creativity in his While We’re Young (2014), the Millennials catch a break in Noah Baumbach’s light, dextrous ...

July 12, 2023 | FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS
THE FILMS OF GRETA GERWIG

The Sparrow

+ intro by poet and essayist Momtaza Mehri (Monday 10 July only) SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. The following is a translation of the French text at the beginnin...

July 10, 2023 | DRAMA AND DESIRE
THE FILMS OF YOUSSEF CHAHINE

Frances Ha

The Japanese, no doubt have a word for it. The French, several: savoir faire, for instance, maybe even l’art de vivre. For the twentysomethings in Noah Baumbach’s latest serio-comic character piece...

July 10, 2023 | FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS
THE FILMS OF GRETA GERWIG

Little Women

Across disparate countries and radically different eras, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has come to life in a million different ways. It is a book that is unsparing in its depiction of the way th...

July 9, 2023 | FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS
THE FILMS OF GRETA GERWIG

The Land

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The novel on which this film is based is about the Egyptian fellah and his land; the film itself is about the same subject and much ...

July 9, 2023 | DRAMA AND DESIRE
THE FILMS OF YOUSSEF CHAHINE

20th Century Women

20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s third dramatic feature, promises to be every bit as autobiographical as Beginners (2010), which confronted his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent decision t...

July 8, 2023 | FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS
THE FILMS OF GRETA GERWIG

Fantasia

Fantasia opens with Deems Taylor, better known to 1940 audiences as a radio broadcaster than a composer, walking on stage amid a tuning-up orchestra. As Fantasia’s host, he explains that this anima...

July 8, 2023 | MAKING MAGIC
100 YEARS OF DISNEY

Akenfield

The screenplay, written by Ronald Blythe, derives from his book Akenfield, a documentary microcosm of rural life in this country which uses as its framework a series of taped interviews with the in...

July 8, 2023 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Name Me Lawand

From Mat Whitecross’s Moving to Mars (2009), a study of two Burmese refugee families resettling in Sheffield, to recent fictional evocations of immigrant dislocation such as Ben Sharrock’s Limbo an...

July 7, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

Cairo Station

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Considered to be Chahine’s masterpiece, Cairo Station was so sharply on point that the film was reviled by many on initial release....

July 7, 2023 | DRAMA AND DESIRE
THE FILMS OF YOUSSEF CHAHINE