BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Last Wave

Peter Weir on ‘The Last Wave’ David Gulpilil, the young aboriginal star, is familiar to American audiences as the star of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout . How did you come to use him? It’s very difficu...

April 1, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

The Garden

This film was such an inspiration to me when I first saw it. It has a lot to do with what was coming out of the speakers. So much of it is shot silently on Super 8, so the sound had to be created f...

April 1, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Witness

When you get down to it, all Peter Weir’s films have been horror movies in disguise. Like the Harkers (Jonathan and Mina), Weir’s heroes have been simultaneously mesmerised and repelled by their va...

March 31, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

Multiple Maniacs

It’s no accident that Multiple Maniacs opens with a carnival barker. Transgressive spectacle is the name of the game in John Waters’s first feature-length talkie – though it’s curious to note, almo...

March 31, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Amélie

The French icon of 2001 is a small, slim young woman with bobbed hair and girlish clothes. Her name is Amélie Poulain. Played by the delightful Audrey Tautou, she is the heroine of France’s latest ...

March 31, 2026 | 25th Anniversary

Trash

At first sight Trash is unmistakably a very good film; re-seen, it has sections at least when it looks like a great film. What it takes on along the way is subtlety and density; far from being impr...

March 30, 2026 | Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen

Punishment Park

It took me a long time to realise quite how experimental the sound design on this film really is. Like all of Peter Watkins’ work, the sonic landscape is doing so much of the heavy lifting in creat...

March 30, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

The Cars That Ate Paris

Contemporary reviews Paris, Australia, that is: a small collection of shabby houses with a ministering church and hospital, somewhere amongst the scrubwood and winding roads of the outback. Once it...

March 30, 2026 | Finding Your Way
The Films of Peter Weir

Body and Soul

That Body and Soul is a seminal film is indisputable. The trouble with it as a seminal film is that it has disappeared into its accrued significance (its germinology?), a film of more context than ...

March 30, 2026 | The Cinematic Life of Boxing

Lawrence of Arabia

On Monday 10 December 1962, at the Odeon Leicester Square, filmgoers first watched Colonel T.E. Lawrence blow out a half-spent match and instantly transform the screen into a blazing red Arabian da...

March 14, 2026 | BFI Member Poll

Multicultural TV in Europe

+ intro by writer and researcher Momtaza Mehri Early explorations of multicultural TV looked at Europe, through the lens of interconnected forms of global oppression. Over time, focus on the lived...

March 13, 2026 | Constructed, Told, Spoken
A Counter-History of Britain on TV

Detroit

A typical Kathryn Bigelow title is like a code begging to be broken. We can make an educated guess as to where on the clock Zero Dark Thirty might be. But how would we know if we came face to face ...

March 13, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

Working Girls

+ intro by writer and film curator So Mayer Director Lizzie Borden meant for Working Girls, her second fiction film, to both extend and depart from Born in Flames, the 1983 underground succès de s...

March 8, 2026 | International Women’s Day
40th Anniversary Screening

Katyn

Andrzej Wajda on ‘Katyn’ I was only able to make Katyn after the fall of the Polish People’s Republic. After 44 years of lies, when there was only one Soviet truth: that the Katyn massacre was comm...

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

A House of Dynamite

‘The thing is, it’s hard for me to analyse what I do because I’m always in the moment and trying to move forward.’ Kathryn Bigelow has come to London by train from Paris, where she was being honour...

March 5, 2026 | Close to the Edge
The Films of Kathryn Bigelow

Wendy and Lucy

To read Wendy and Lucy’s plot synopsis is to wonder how in the name of God a film could be constructed around such a slight premise (a young homeless woman loses her dog) – and, still yet, not just...

March 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Korczak

The screening on Monday 2 March will include a Q&A with filmmaker Agnieszka Holland Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990) paid tribute to a man who spent most of his life in pursuit of an ideal. Alth...

March 2, 2026 | Andrzej Wajda
Portraits of History and Humanity

A Focus on the Bandung File

+ extended intro with Tariq Ali and film programmer Matthew Barrington in conversation Bandung File replaced the magazine format with incisive reporting that spotlighted injustice across the globe...

March 2, 2026 | Constructed, Told, Spoken
A Counter-History of Britain on TV

Wałęsa - Man of Hope

Most biopics about historical figures are made long after the subjects have died and by filmmakers who didn’t directly know them. Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope is an exception to this general...

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

Gamera Trilogy

It’s the mid-1960s, and kaiju are in vogue. Screens across Japan are dominated by colossal creatures like Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah, Dogora, and even Frankenstein’s monster, all of whi...

February 28, 2026 | Restored Special
International Premiere of 4K Restorations

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