BFI Southbank has revealed its programme for late October and November 2023, including the start of Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger, a major BFI UK-wide film celebration of one of the greatest and most enduring filmmaking partnerships in the history of cinema: Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988), who together made masterpieces such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). A central part of the nationwide big screen programme, which is the most comprehensive celebration of Powell and Pressburger‘s work ever undertaken, will be a BFI Southbank retrospective running from 16 October – 31 December. The season includes special events and Q&As, new BFI restorations and remasters of Powell’s early films, work they made independently of one another, and a major exhibition drawn from the collections of the BFI National Archive and key third-party loans.
Highlights of the programme in October and November will include Thelma Schoonmaker In Conversation on 26 October; The Red Shoes: Beyond The Mirror, a free exhibition running from 10 November – 7 January featuring over 100 previously unseen items, including an original pair of Moira Shearer’s iconic red ballet shoes featured in the film; a screening of Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes (Ross MacGibbon, 2020) on 11 November followed by a Q&A with choreographer Matthew Bourne and dancer Ashley Shaw; a UK-wide BFI Distribution re-release of heady romantic masterpiece I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation in association with ITV and Park Circus with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation with additional support provided by Matt Spick, screening from 19 October, with a special screening introduced by Thelma Schoonmaker on 26 October; plus further talks and discussions from experts including film historian Ian Christie, writer Marina Warnerand production designer Sarah Greenwood.
Also in September will be POower to the People: Horace Ové’s Radical Vision, a celebration of the work of Sir Horace Ové, the celebrated photographer, painter and writer, best-known as a pioneering filmmaker. The centrepiece of the season will be the 4K restoration of Pressure (1975), Ové’s ground-breaking exploration of the anxieties of an emerging second-generation of West Indians in Britain. Originally funded by the BFI Production Board, Pressure has been restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, with additional thanks to the BFI Philanthropy ‘Pioneers of Black British Filmmaking consortium’. Following its simultaneous Restoration World Premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express and at the New York Film Festival on 11 October , the film will be re-released by BFI Distribution in cinemas and on BFI Player from 3 November. A preview screening and discussion of Pressure on 23 October hosted by academic Dr Clive Nwonka, with producers Annabelle Alcazar and Robert Buckler, writer and academic Caryl Phillips and filmmaker Rhea Storr , will herald the re-release.
An illustrated discussion, Horace Ové: Reflecting the People – A Career Retrospective will kick off the season on 23 October, including a Q&A with actor Lennie James, producers Annabelle Alcazar, Peter Ansorge, Tara Prem and Marcus Ryder, chaired by Samira Ahmed, with films screening in the season including The Black Safari (1972), King Carnival (1973), Playing Away (1985), Dabbawallahs (1985), Baldwin’s N***** (1969) including a Q&A with author Colin Grant and additional guests on 4 November plus some titles which influenced Ové’s work, Bicycle Thieves (1948), Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955), and a Seniors matinee of La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960).
With the arrival of BFI Distribution’s The Eternal Daughter (2022) in cinemas from 24 November, following its special presentation at the 66th BFI London Film Festival in 2022, there’s no better time to look back on the filmography of Joanna Hogg and the cinematic influences that made her than with the season Internal Reflections: The Films of Joanna Hogg. Special events will include Joanna Hogg In Conversation on 15 November where the filmmaker will talk about her career so far, as well as a preview of The Eternal Daughter on 10 November, followed by a Q&A with Joanna Hogg and actor Tilda Swinton. Other titles playing in the season will include Unrelated (2007), Hogg’s exceptional feature debut, Exhibition (2013), a hypnotising portrait of two creatives attempting to coexist, and The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir: Part II (2021), a tour de force of autobiographical cinematic storytelling. Alongside the retrospective we invite our audiences to dive deeper with Joanna Hogg: Influences, a selection of films chosen by the filmmaker which reflect where her interests lie right now, including Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954), The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964), Ticket of No Return (Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) and Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011).
The endless possibilities of time travel on screen will be explored in Destination Time Travel: Playing with Time in Film and TV, a season that mixes old and new titles, some well-known and others more obscure, including The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960), Planet of the Apes (Franklin J Schaffner, 1968), Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi, 2020) and the Back to the Future Trilogy. The season will also include a preview of The Lazarus Project (Carl Tibbets, 2023) series two on 24 October, followed by a Q&A with actors Paapa Essiedu, Caroline Quentin, Anjli Mohindra and writer Joe Barton. There will also be a Comedy Time-Travel Special on 5 November featuring a screening of Red Dwarf: Backwards (Ed Bye, BBC, 1989) and the first episode of Timewasters (George Kane, ITV, 2017), with onstage guests: Red Dwarf writer Rob Grant, exec producer Paul Jackson, actor Robert Llewellyn and director Ed Bye; and creator and star of Timewasters Daniel Lawrence Taylor.
Other special events at BFI Southbank this month will include a preview of Time series two. Written by multi-award-winning Jimmy McGovern (Broken, Cracker) and Helen Black (Life and Death in the Warehouse), the new series is told from the perspective of three very different inmates. Arriving at a prison on the same day, Kelsey (Bella Ramsey), Orla (Jodie Whittaker) and Abi (Tamara Lawrance) are thrown together to face an unfamiliar world. A preview of episode one on 18 October will be followed by a Q&A with writers Jimmy McGovern and Helen Black, and actors Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrance, Bella Ramsey and Siobhan Finneran. With half of the original episodes missing, except for their audio, Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace [animated] (Julia Smith/AnneMarie Walsh, 1967/2023) is a newly animated version presenting the complete story 56 years after it first screened. It World Premieres at BFI Southbank on 21 October. The Doctor, Polly, Ben and Jamie arrive in the city of Atlantis where they discover a plot to drain the earth’s oceans.
Following its premiere at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, a preview of Girl (Adura Onashile, 2023) is this month’s Woman with a Movie Camera pick, in which the BFI celebrates women’s contribution to cinema and spotlight female stories. Migrant Grace’s carefully built world of safety and routine is tested when her daughter Ama must return to school. A tender exploration of the impact of trauma, Girl is backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, and the screening on 7 November will be followed by a Q&A with feature debut director Adura Onashile.
Meanwhile, journey through the collected music videos and short features produced and directed by Bill Butt in collaboration with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond in their various guises as The JAMs, The KLF and The Timelords, one of the most successful, subversively creative and enigmatic electronic bands of the early 90s, with 23 Seconds to Eternity (Bill Butt, 2023). The KLF became the biggest selling singles act in the world with a series of international acid house anthems, and this is the first time all of their films and music videos have been compiled and presented together. A screening on 6 November to mark the film’s release on dual-format BFI DVD and Blu-ray will be followed by a Q&A with the director.
