BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Wedding

A contemporary review In Poland the play by Stanislaw Wyspianski is familiar territory. The Wedding reconstructs a marriage which actually took place in 1900 at the village of Bronowice on Poland’s...

February 8, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

Far from the Madding Crowd

‘A compelling examination of a woman navigating the constructive and destructive consequences of love, all framed against the beauty of an English countryside freighted with yearning and pathos.’ –...

February 8, 2026 | Member Picks

The Fall of Otrar

+ intro by writer Daniel Bird The origins of The Fall of Otrar can be traced back to the Kazakh screenwriter Zauresh Yergaliyeva. According to Yergaliyeva, in the sixth grade she came across Ermuk...

February 8, 2026 | Restored

The Birds

In his technically most difficult film, The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock directly addresses the theme of destructive, rapacious nature that was always implicit in his fascination with crime. Federico Fe...

February 8, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Blue Steel

Kathryn Bigelow: With Blue Steel I wanted to do a ‘woman’s action film’, putting a woman at the centre of a movie predominantly occupied by men. When women go to see Lethal Weapon, many of them wil...

February 7, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

The Ashes

Not to be confused with Ashes and Diamonds (1958), The Ashes was adapted from Stefan Zeromski’s 1904 novel, and conceived on a massive scale. The action spans the period 1797 to 1812, including the...

February 7, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

Everything for Sale

In Everything for Sale Andrzej Wajda has triumphantly forged the link between art and reality and, as he prophesied, the process was far from simple. The catalyst seems quintessential both of Wajda...

February 6, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

The Maids of Wilko

The screening on Thursday 5 February will include a Q&A with Oscar-winning production designer Allan Starski and costume designer Wiesława Starska Between Man of Iron and Danton, Wajda announ...

February 5, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

A Fish Called Wanda

John Cleese on ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ and director Charles Crichton In the late 1960s, Graham Chapman and I wrote a script for David Frost. It was about a small firm of private detectives and was ca...

February 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Near Dark

In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City singled out independent horror film Near Dark, made by up-and-coming director Kathryn Bigelow, for special attention. Recognising the film’...

February 3, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

The Loveless

A graduate in fine art and film studies, Kathryn Bigelow wrote and directed her stylised, colour-saturated first feature with Monty Montgomery. The Loveless was both the last of the juvenile delinq...

February 1, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

A Generation

When the 28-year-old Andrzej Wajda made A Generation, his debut feature, he was clearly in thrall to the Italian non-realists. He eschewed the contrivance of studio filmmaking, preferring to work o...

February 1, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

Nouvelle Vague

A precedent has been broken. The omens for a movie about the making of À bout de souffle (1960) were not favourable: comparable projects like Hitchcock (2012) and Mank (2020), about the makings of ...

January 28, 2026 | Seniors Paid Matinee

National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman on ‘National Gallery’ Why did you settle on the National Gallery as the subject for this film? The first reason is that it’s one of the great museums of the world. Second is tha...

January 25, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

David Lynch - The Art Life

Famously tight-lipped when it comes to discussing his work, offering little more than peculiar observations – ‘Keep your eye on the donut’ – David Lynch’s disarming ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ person...

January 14, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Twin Peaks – original US pilot episode

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television, BFI National Archive A contemporary review There’s been a rush to proclaim the apocalypse in everything that has been written so far about T...

January 12, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Ex Libris - The New York Public Library

‘Libraries are not about books,’ explains architect Francine Houben, ‘libraries are about people.’ Frederick Wiseman could hardly have written a more perfect summation of his invigorating new film,...

January 11, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Out 1

Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-plus Out 1 languished for years as one of European cinema’s great unseen films, although it has gradually emerged into the daylight over the past decade or so. Out 1 is pe...

January 10, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

La Danse - Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris

Performance has been a concern of legendary documentarist Frederick Wiseman ever since his 1967 debut Titicut Follies, titled after the revue put on by prisoners and guards at the mental asylum exp...

January 10, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Moon

The screening on Wednesday 21 January will be introduced by Melanie Bell, Feminist Film Historian and Principal Investigator for the Film Costumes in Action project SPOILER WARNING The following n...

January 9, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

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