The Final Film Festival has announced the complete programme for its inaugural edition, taking place across London from 6-9 August.
Launching as a “multi-venue celebration of independent cinema, repertory discoveries and emerging voices”, TFFF brings together new international premieres, overlooked classics, special screenings and experimental works across venues including Curzon Soho, ICA, Genesis Cinema, The Castle Cinema, Peckhamplex, The Nickel Cinema and more.
The festival opens with the previously announced Perfumania, a “madcap freewheeling comedy” by director/musician Charlotte Ercoli, and closes with Faces of Death by Conan Le Cillaire (John Alan Schwartz), the 1978 film that gained notoriety in the ’80s VHS era, presented as a world premiere of the new restoration.
The Final Film Festival was founded by independent film programmers Jack Hewitt and Kit Ramsay, with the aim of creating a new home for independent cinema in London, bringing together new voices, rediscovered works and the filmmakers shaping the future of film culture.
Ramsay said: “TFFF has come about quickly and excitingly because it’s filling a gap in London’s cinema culture!
“In an age of ‘online’ cinephilia and taste curation, audiences can find, through various means, a far broader diet than is typical for a four-wall cinema or festival.
“The fact is that TFFF comes from a few disparate influences; we love the mainstay cinemas and festivals London has to offer, but we also love the pop-up cinema culture found in bar basements all over and the repertory festivals of Bristol and Bologna [Cinema Rediscovered and Il Cinema Ritrovato]. We wanted a festival to exist that housed all that under one programme.”
Hewitt added: “TFFF is best described as an inevitability. With the recent success of similar flavours of festivals like LA Festival of Movies (LAFM) and Brunswick Underground Film Festival (BUFF), there is a clear cultural demand for that brand of filmmaker/community-focused programming.
“With our programme in particular, Kit and I realised that there is no consistent pipeline for a bulk of films premiering at Tribeca, New/Next, Rotterdam and Locarno to quickly come to London unless a name is attached or it befits an arthouse’s monthly strand. London hasn’t been a hub for independent cinema in decades; we wanted to change that.”
The programme includes an In Competition section of eight films by emerging filmmakers screening as world and UK premieres exclusively at The Nickel Cinema; while the Out-of-Competition section showcases for the first time in the UK works of indie filmmakers shown at film festivals in the US and internationally, such as Locarno, San Sebastian, Tallahassee, New/Next Baltimore, Downtown Festival, Berlinale, SXSW, and Tribeca.
The Repertory programmes celebrate rediscovered, underseen and newly reevaluated works, plus an In Focus: programme celebrating maverick filmmaker, the late Albert Pyun, and a selection presented in collaboration with independent distributor Radiance Films.
A section of Special Screenings includes unique current and repertory titles, as well as an In Focus of four shorts from between 1984-1992 by music video director Richard Heslop, with further titles to be announced.
Alongside feature works, TFFF includes a Short Film Showcase that embraces the friction between different forms and perspectives in filmmaking.
Full programme details are available on the TFFF website.
