BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Charulata

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. Two hands, a man’s and a woman’s, reach tentatively out to each other. But just before they meet, the frame freezes. Reconciliation...

August 5, 2022 | SATYAJIT RAY
THE LANGUAGE OF FILM

Rockers

‘Greetings and love to one and all.’ Originally conceived as a documentary about the late 70s scene, Theodoros Bafaloukos’s wonderfully loose, quirky and free-wheeling film gradually morphed into a...

August 4, 2022 | FROM JAMAICA TO THE WORLD
REGGAE ON FILM

Gaslight

Following the success of his first two films, The High Command in 1936 and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery in 1939, director Thorold Dickinson was offered the opportunity to direct the adaptation of Pa...

August 4, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Forever a Woman

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Inspired by the life of celebrated female poet Fumiko Nakajō, who met an untimely death aged 32 from breast cancer, Tanaka embarked ...

August 3, 2022 | KINUYO TANAKA
A LIFE IN FILM

The Music Room

‘The Music Room is a deeply felt, extremely tedious film. On the one hand its western derivations are patent (the Greek-revival mansion no more than the Chekhovian theme). On the other hand its chi...

August 1, 2022 | SATYAJIT RAY
THE LANGUAGE OF FILM

The Manchurian Candidate

In September 1961, Frank Sinatra – the most widely publicised of the president’s friends – was a weekend guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Among other things, Sinatra used his visit to...

August 1, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Love Letter

Love Letter is the first film of legendary actor turned director Kinuyo Tanaka. The man writes love letters to make a living. One of the women who asks him to do so is someone he’s been searching f...

August 1, 2022 | KINUYO TANAKA
A LIFE IN FILM

Inna de Yard

While recording a collaborative album in Stony Hill, Jamaica, and preparing for a concert in Paris, a group of reggae veterans including Cedric Myton, Ken Boothe, Judy Mowatt and Lloyd Parks discus...

August 1, 2022 | FROM JAMAICA TO THE WORLD
REGGAE ON FILM

Conscientious Protectors

Conscientious Protectors puts you right in the middle of the beginnings of the Extinction Rebellion movement. The film follows the founding members of the non-violent direct action climate change g...

August 1, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Elizabeth R

After the great public and critical success of The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), the BBC turned hopefully to the turbulent life of the King’s daughter, Elizabeth. The approach was essentially th...

July 30, 2022 | GLENDA JACKSON

Paris, Texas

Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) walks out of the desert after four years, to the amazement of his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell). Reunited with Hunter, his seven-year-old son, Travis decides ...

July 29, 2022 | RE-RELEASES

Hit the Road

If modern Iranian cinema already has one family filmmaking dynasty established in the Makhmalbafs (father Mohsen, followed by daughters Samira and Hana), step forward a second second-generation tal...

July 29, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Grey Gardens

‘The most incredible documentary of all time.’ (Jenny Newman, BFI Member) It’s a documentary, but you couldn’t make it up. Imagine if John Waters shot a script by Tennessee Williams and it was bro...

July 29, 2022 | MEMBER EXCLUSIVES

Elizabeth Is Missing

Glenda Jackson made a triumphant return to UK TV after an absence of over 25 years with this astonishing performance, for which she won a BAFTA. Andrea Gibb’s script (based on a novel by Emma Heale...

July 29, 2022 | GLENDA JACKSON

Electricity

+ intro and discussion. Like an ‘Electrical storm that starts in my skull’… Those are the words Lily (Deyn), a young woman with epilepsy, uses to describe the sensations experienced from sporadi...

July 25, 2022 | RELAXED SCREENING

Commemorating Marikana

Join us for a day of films and talks as we reflect on the tragic 2012 massacre of mineworkers in Marikana, South Africa. Co-chairs from Marikana Solidarity are: Amanda Latimer (Kingston University)...

July 24, 2022 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Kurt Vonnegut
Unstuck in Time

When he was younger, enthralled by his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Robert Weide wrote a letter to Kurt Vonnegut, proposing to make a documentary on the author. Surprisingly, Vonnegut agreed, and the...

July 22, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

The Stranger

After the heart attack that interrupted filming on The Home and the World, Satyajit Ray completed only three more films before his death. His Ibsen adaptation, An Enemy of the People, was disappoin...

July 21, 2022 | SATYAJIT RAY
THE LANGUAGE OF FILM

The Mirror Has Two Faces

+ intro by BFI Events Programmer Kimberley Sheehan Rose (Streisand), an unlucky-in-love college professor, is at the end of her tether with dating. Thanks to her sister’s meddling she’s thrown tog...

July 21, 2022 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies!!?

+ live experimental music introduction by The Howling. Set around a series of murders connected to a creepy sideshow fortune teller, The Incredibly Strange Creatures is an unusual, unpredictable r...

July 20, 2022 | EXPERIMENTA