BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Rafiki

The first Kenyan film to be selected for Cannes, Rafiki was banned in its home country last year – not for its lesbian content per se, but for its tone of hopefulness. The censors, director Wanuri ...

February 14, 2022 | SEEN & HEARD

T A P E x Invisible Women Present - Touched

+ pre-recorded Q&A Celebrate the diversity and fluidity of desire with Touched, an alternative Valentine’s Day screening showcasing sensuous shorts by female and non-binary filmmakers. Co-cura...

February 13, 2022 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
POWERED BY JAGUAR

A Fantastic Woman

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The viewer first encounters Marina Vidal (Daniela Vega), the defiant, enigmatic protagonist of Sebastián Lelio’s fifth feature, as s...

February 13, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Study Day + Acting Out - Stephen Dwoskin film screening

An introduction to Dwoskin through talks, a keynote presentation by Adrian Martin plus a screening of Acting Out: Stephen Dwoskin, a film by artist Philomène Hoël. Dwoskin’s career, not only a...

February 12, 2022 | EXPERIMENTA FOCUS - STEPHEN DWOSKIN

My Beautiful Laundrette

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Originally shot for television in six weeks on a low budget, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears, from aut...

February 12, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

‘Excuse me, can you go back the same way?’ The taxi turns around. This is the first manoeuvre in a film whose English title anticipates its narrative twists. Except this isn’t the same way, this is...

February 11, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Mustang

Deniz Gamze Ergüven on ‘Mustang’ Five years ago you were at the Cinéfondation workshop for young filmmakers at Cannes, struggling to develop Kings, a script about the Los Angeles riots. Then your c...

February 11, 2022 | SEEN & HEARD

Desert Hearts

Although it has become a cult classic due to its explicit lesbian sex, Desert Hearts is a wonderfully well-made film with a host of appealing attributes. Steeped in moody, classic country and weste...

February 11, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Victim

John Coldstream on ‘Victim’ Artistic endeavour too often attracts exaggerated claims. In my research, I attempted to identify films that had genuinely made an impact not merely on the minds of tho...

February 10, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Rope

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. At the very end of Truffaut’s interview book, Hitchcock comes up with a ‘dream’ project: 24 hours in the life of a city. ‘It starts ...

February 10, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Philosophical Screens
Jules et Jim

François Truffaut’s lyrical and melancholic journey through the lives of the participants in a love triangle makes for one of his most adored films; Jules et Jim offers a profound and complicated p...

February 10, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold on ‘Fish Tank’ ‘The thing about the film industry is that it’s incredibly middle-class, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘All the people who look at it and study it and talk about it – write abou...

February 10, 2022 | SEEN & HEARD

The Story of Adele H.

François Truffaut on ‘The Story of Adele H.’ It was in 1969 that I first felt I wanted to make a film whose heroine would be Adèle Hugo. I had just read in the collection ‘Bibliothèque Introuvable’...

February 9, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

Go Fish

This is a fish story about not the one that got away, but the one that got caught and won the trophy. Caught big time, in other words. But it’s also a cautionary tale, one about marketing, identity...

February 9, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Brokeback Mountain

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The prose style of Annie Proulx’s 1997 story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, first published in the New Yorker, is doggedly brisk. The moment ...

February 9, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Woman Next Door

Mike Figgis on ‘The Woman Next Door’ The following scene takes place 19 minutes and 45 seconds into François Truffaut’s 1981 film, The Woman Next Door: Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) is in a supermar...

February 8, 2022 | FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS

My Own Private Idaho

At the opening of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, we look down a very long stretch of two-lane highway, bisecting the desert scrubland, curving upwards as it disappears into the distant mounta...

February 8, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Happy Together

+ intro by Yi Wang, Queer East (on Tuesday 8 February only) A trip to Buenos Aires reveals the dark side of love as a gay couple (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung) struggle with jealousy, co-dependenc...