BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Hidden Fortress

If Kurosawa had proven himself skilled at subverting the conventions of Japanese genre filmmaking, with this hugely entertaining film he not only proved he could embrace a straightforward adventure...

January 20, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Spirit of the Beehive

Set in a small village in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war, Erice’s bewitching portrait of innocence, the perils of adulthood and the power of cinema is a truly sensory experience. Illuminate...

January 19, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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High and Low

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Among his collaborators and crew, Akira Kurosawa was known as kaze-otoko – ‘wind man’. (The nickname tenno – ‘emperor’ – was wished ...

January 19, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Kurosawa Season Introduction

Season co-programmers Asif Kapadia and Ian Haydn Smith will be joined by a guest speaker for this introduction event to discuss the key themes structuring the Kurosawa season and the films screenin...

January 18, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Darren Aronofsky in Conversation

Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky was born and raised in Brooklyn. Aronofsky heads Protozoa Pictures, based in Chinatown NYC. His upcoming film The Whale for A24 stars Brendan Fr...

January 18, 2023 | IN PERSON & PREVIEWS

A Brighter Summer Day

Measured, elliptical and understated, Yang’s riveting account of growing up in Taiwan in the early 1960s focuses on a boy’s on-off involvement in gang rivalry and violence and his experience of you...

January 16, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Dodes’ka-den

After five years’ absence, Kurosawa returned to the cinema with his first colour feature. It was also his first following the end of his collaboration with Toshiro Mifune and the archetypal superma...

January 15, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Bait

I always wanted to make a film about the fishing industry. 16mm, black & white, dirty, full of grain, faces, working hands, the rough edges, warts and all, wild, tangible, real. It actually en...

January 15, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Two Years at Sea

The screening on Saturday 14 January will feature an intro and Q&A with Mark Jenkin and Ben Rivers. It’s the aesthetic, the grain, the flicker, the texture that draws me in. But it’s the comp...

January 14, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, groun...

January 14, 2023 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA PREVIEW

Modern Times

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. The last Chaplin film to feature the little tramp still astonishes. Featuring visually inventive set pieces – including a productio...

January 13, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Idiot

With his central metaphor of snow – the towering drifts that turn streets and houses into blind burrows where dark, scurrying figures, blanketed by the snow that never seems to stop falling, seek a...

January 13, 2023 | KUROSAWA

Enys Men

A cross between folk horror and nature documentary, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men is as idiosyncratic as his acclaimed first feature, Bait. Told through poetic visuals, it is similarly shot on grainy 16mm...

January 13, 2023 | NEW RELEASES

A Matter of Life and Death

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A most peculiar and potent cocktail of romance, theology, global bridge-building and national tub-thumping, this thoughtful drama ab...

January 12, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Chungking Express

‘I can honestly say, probably more than any other movie in the last two years, no movie spoke to me, got under my skin, just made me fall in love with it. I’ve seen Chungking Express several times,...

January 12, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Penda's Fen

There has to be an Alan Clarke film in this season. Although it’s a real outlier in terms of his body of work, this was a touchstone when I was developing Enys Men. I’d be lying if I said I fully k...

January 11, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Kagemusha

This magisterial epic of 16th-century Japan was Akira Kurosawa’s great homecoming movie after a decade either working abroad or in the doldrums following the critical drubbing faced by his 1970 fil...

January 11, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Gleaners and I + La Jetée

Agnès Varda describes The Gleaners and I as a ‘wandering road documentary’. While it covers some of the same ground as Vagabond – for instance, rural poverty and subsistence living – it returns to ...

January 11, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Parasite

Last year at Cannes, Lee Chang-dong held up a magnifying glass to Korean society and unveiled his critique on the one per cent vs the 99 per cent in Burning. Now it’s Bong Joon-ho’s turn. Of course...

January 9, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Sátántangó

A monumental cinematic achievement, Sátántangó bears testimony to the purity of the director’s artistic vision and the perfection of his craft. On a canvas that is both dark and deep, Béla Tarr pai...

January 8, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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