April 2018 at BFI Southbank

March 1, 2018March 1, 2018 rodneyappleyard 5432 Views

ONSTAGE APPEARANCES INCLUDE:

MUSICIAN ROD STEWART AND DIRECTOR FRANCIS MEGAHY (ROD THE MOD),ACTOR LESLEY MANVILLE (PHANTOM THREAD), ACTOR MAXINE PEAKE (FUNNY COW), ACTOR RITA TUSHINGHAM (A TASTE OF HONEY), ACTOR TOM COURTENAY(THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER), DIRECTOR ASIF KAPADIA (AMY), DIRECTOR VALESKA GRISEBACH (WESTERN, BE MY STAR), ACTOR SOFIA HELIN (THE BRIDGE), ACTOR CATHY TYSON (MONA LISA), DIRECTOR DESMOND DAVIS (GIRL WITH GREEN EYES), DIRECTOR SARMAD MASUD (MY PURE LAND), DIRECTORS KATE MCLARNON AND SKY NEAL (EVEN WHEN I FALL)

Film previews: WONDERSTRUCK (Todd Haynes, 2017), LET THE SUNSHINE IN (Claire Denis, 2017), FUNNY COW (Adrian Shergold, 2017), BEAST (Michael Pearce, 2017), EVEN WHEN I FALL (Kate McLarnon, Sky Neal, 2017), THE RIDER (Chloé Zhao, 2017), MARLINA THE MURDERER IN FOUR ACTS (Mouly Surya, 2017)

TV previews: The Bridge (BBC-Filmlance International-Nimbus Film, 2018)

New and Re-Releases: 120 BPM 120 BATTEMENTS PAR MINUTE (Robin Campillo, 2017), WESTERN (Valeska Grisebach, 2017), LOOK BACK IN ANGER (Tony Richardson, 1958), A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS PER UN PUGNO DI DOLLARI (Sergio Leone, 1964), THE OLD DARK HOUSE (James Whale, 1932)

This April BFI Southbank hosts a season dedicated to the legendary British film company Woodfall Films, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2018, and was responsible for classics such as Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) and the Oscar-winning smash Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963). WOODFALL: A REVOLUTION IN BRITISH CINEMA will be a month-long season, followed by the release of BFI DVD and Blu-ray box sets and a collection on BFI Player.

As classic Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) is re-released in cinemas this April, BFI Southbank celebrates an undisputed master of cinema, SERGIO LEONE, with screenings of all his films, as well as a complementary season of contemporary westerns.

BFI Southbank’s second CLOSE-UP focus (following Andrey Zvyagintsev in February), will this month look at the work of an intriguing voice in contemporary cinema, German director VALESKA GRISEBACH. Grisebach will be on stage during the CLOSE-UP to present her new film Western (2017), which will show on extended run to coincide with its UK cinema release.

Completing the line-up for seasons in April will be the continuation of ANIMATION 2018, the BFI’s year-long focus at all things animated. This month will focus on the work of the unique talents of The Quay Brothers, who count David Lynch and Christopher Nolan among their fans.

The events programme for April includes a preview of Funny Cow (Adrian Shergold, 2017) starring Maxine Peake, which kicks off a weekend examining Working-Class Heroes, with talks, discussions and screenings looking at the working-class heroes behind and in front of the camera, and asking, can working-class talent still thrive in British film in 2018? Guests during the weekend will include Lesley Manville, Maxine Peake, Asif Kapadia and Cathy Tyson. Full details will be announced soon.Other film previews in April include Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis, 2017), Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck (2017) and BFI-backed Beast (Michael Pearce, 2017), followed by a discussion with cast and crew to be announced.

There will be a MISSING BELIEVED WIPED screening of Rod the Mod (ITV, 1965), a recently rediscovered treasure, long-thought missing. The screening, rescheduled from January, will be followed by a Q&A with Rod Stewart and director FrancisMegahy. Hit Scandi Noir The Bridge (BBC-Filmlance International-Nimbus Film, 2018) culminates this spring, and BFI Southbank will preview the first episode of the final series, followed by a Q&A with lead actor Sofia Helin.

WOODFALL

THU 5 APR, 20:15 – MEMBER EXCLUSIVE: Members Salon: Look Back in Anger
MON 9 APR, 11:00 – SENIORS’ FREE TALK: A Personal Look at Woodfall Films
MON 9 APR, 14:00 – SENIORS’ FREE MATINEE + DISUCSSION: Red, White and Zero (short programme): The White Bus (Lindsay Anderson, 1967), Ride of the Valkyrie (Peter Brook, 1967) and Red and Blue (Tony Richardson, 1967)
MON 9 APR, 18:30 – TALK: Looks Like England: Design and Cinematography in Woodfall Films
SAT 14 APR, 17:40 – SPECIAL EVENT: The Stories that Changed British Cinema panel discussion with guests TBC, followed by a screening of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)
WED 18 APR, 18:20 – TALK: Sounds Like England: Voice in Woodfall Films
FRI 20 APR, 18:25 – SCREENING + INTRO: Girl with Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964) / Onstage: director Desmond Davis

This spring the BFI will pay tribute to the ground-breaking British film company Woodfall Films. Woodfall revolutionised British cinema during the 1960s with a slate of iconic films such as Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Today, many of these classics continue to influence and inspire filmmakers and filmmaking, actors, fashion, music and style. As the company reaches its 60^thAnniversary in 2018, the BFI will launch WOODFALL: A REVOLUTION IN BRITISH CINEMA, a month-long season at BFI Southbank beginning 2 April 2018,incorporating screenings and special events.

The celebrations continue with the release of DVD and Blu-ray box sets on 28 May that bring many of Woodfall’s newly restored films to Blu-ray for the first time. Audiences UK-wide will also have the opportunity to watch online via BFI Player and for free in BFI Mediatheques around the country.

Special events in the BFI Southbank season will include The Stories that Changed British Cinema, a panel discussion on Saturday 14 April with very special guests to be confirmed. This takes place during Working-Class Heroes, a weekend of conversations and live events to celebrate working-class talent, which is a taster for a dedicated season later this year; more details of the weekend and the season will be announced in due course. There will also be talks; Looks Like England: Design and Cinematography in Woodfall Films and Sounds Like England: Voice in Woodfall Films, and a BFI Members Salon on Look Back in Anger, which will be on extended run at BFI Southbank and released in selected cinemas UK-wide on 2 April by Park Circus.

A full season press release is available here:

SERGIO LEONE

FRI 6 APR, 18:00 – TALK: Sir Christopher Frayling on Sergio Leone’s Very Italian Western
FRI 6 APR, 19:50 – SCREENING + INTRO: Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) / Onstage: Sergio Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling
THU 12 APR, 18:10 – SCREENING + Q&A: My Pure Land (Sarmad Masud, 2017) / Onstage: director Sarmad Masud
FRI 13 APR, 20:25 – WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA FILM PREVIEW: Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya, 2017)
THU 19 APR, 20:30 – FILM PREVIEW: The Rider (Chloé Zhao, 2017)
SAT 21 APR, 13:30 – AFRICAN ODYSSEYS SCREENING + INTRO: La Belle at the Movies (Cecilia Zoppelletto, 2016) + The Return of an Adventurer (Moustapha Alassane, 1966) / Onstage: director Cecilia Zoppelletto
SAT 21 APR, 16:00-18:00 – AFRICAN ODYSSEYS TALK: Africa Goes West: The Black Cowboy

From Monday 2 April – Monday 30 April, BFI Southbank will celebrate one of the undisputed masters of cinema, Sergio Leone. While they may not have been the first spaghetti westerns, Leone’s Dollars trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) are certainly the best known – they paved the way for Clint Eastwood to break Europe and for Leone to have an enduring influence on cinema.

As part of the season, A Fistful of Dollars will screen on extended run from Friday 13 April, when it is re-released in selected cinemas by Park Circus. The season will include screenings of all of Leone’s features, as well as a talk from Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling on Friday 6 April.

Running in tandem with the season will also be a series of modern westerns which have sought to do something new and different with the genre. Screenings will include My Pure Land (2017), which will be followed by a Q&A with director Sarmad Masud, Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016) and a preview of Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (2017).

Regular BFI series including WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA and AFRICAN ODYSSEYS will seek to explore westerns this month, with the latter series including an illustrated exploration of the African diaspora’s contribution to the classic Hollywood genre.

Full season details will be released in due course.

CLOSE UP: VALESKA GRISEBACH

TUE 10 APR, 18:15 – FILM PREVIEW + Q&A: Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017) / Onstage: director Valeska Grisebach
TUE 10 APR, 21:15 – SCREENING + INTRO: Be My Star Mein Stern (Valeska Grisebach, 2001) / Onstage: director Valeska Grisebach

More than a decade after her previous film Longing, German director VALESKA GRISEBACH makes a welcome return with the simmering drama Western (2017), which screened at last year’s BFI London Film Festival. CLOSE-UP: VALESKA GRISEBACH will welcome this intriguing voice in contemporary cinema – a voice that turns the lens towards societal and cinematic constructs.

The focus will begin on Tuesday 10 April, with a preview of Western, followed by a Q&A with Grisebach, and a screening of Grisebach’s debut feature Be My Star (2001), a subtle documentary-style study of Austrian teenagers falling in and out of love, which Grisebach will also introduce.

Also screening will be Longing (2006), which was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin. Longing is a deceptively simple story, centring on metalworker and volunteer firefighter Markus, an ‘average Joe’ content with his life and his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, until his emotions are stirred by a waitress from a nearby town.

Following the film’s preview on Tuesday 10 April, Western will screen on extended run from Friday 20 April, the day the film is released in cinemas across the UK. On Western Grisebach worked in lengthy, close collaboration with non-professional actors to create a delicately nuanced, psychologically astute study of human relationships.

Here, the interactions of a group of German construction workers, both with each other and with the inhabitants of a Bulgarian village where they’re employed for the summer, make for a wholly authentic, profoundly insightful account of masculinity, community and conflict.

ANIMATION 2018: EASTERN EUROPEAN EXPERIMENTATION

MON 16 APR, 18:30 – TALK: The Quay Brothers: Their Art and Inspiration
MON 23 APR, 18:10 – SCREENING + INTRO: British Animation Meets the 21st Century + intro by Jez Stewart, BFI Curator (Animation)

The BFI’s year-long celebration of all things animated, ANIMATION 2018, continues in April with a focus on the QUAY BROTHERS, the American born, UK-based twins whose stop-motion style of animation is incredibly distinctive and experimental. Acclaimed for their short animated films, such as The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984) and Street of Crocodiles (1986) the brothers, who have been based in the UK for over 40 years, cite their influences as Eastern-European filmmakers such as Walerian Borowczyk, Ladislas Starevich and Jan Švankmajer, while in turn, their admirers include Christopher Nolan, David Lynch and Terry Gilliam.

The season will include a compilation of some of their most influential and mind-bending shorts, which are also available to view on BFI Player. The Quay Brothers moved from short-form animation to live-action feature with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995), a surreal tale about a young man who becomes a student at an unusual school for servants run by a brother and sister.

Beautifully shot in black and white, this is a puzzling, dark, non-traditional tale that still contains many of the Brothers’ hallmark tropes despite its lack of stop-motion. For those wishing to delve deeper into the brothers’ extraordinary body of work, there is a talk – The Quay Brothers: Their Art and Inspiration – on Thursday 12 April. Wrapping up the April line-up is a programme of recent animated acquisitions of the BFI National Archive, introduced by the BFI’s Animation Curator Jez Stewart.

EVENTS, PREVIEWS AND REGULAR STRANDS

TUE 3 APR, 18:10 – FILM PREVIEW: Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes, 2017)
WED 4 APR, 18:30 – FILM PREVIEW + Q&A: Even When I Fall (Kate McLarnon, Sky Neal, 2017) / Onstage: directors Kate McLarnon and Sky Neal, producer Elhum Shakerifar
SUN 8 APR, 16:15 – FILM PREVIEW: A Fistful of Dollars Per un pugno di dollari(Sergio Leone, 1964)
MON 9 APR, 18:15 – FILM PREVIEW + Q&A: Let the Sunshine In Un beau soleil intérieur (Claire Denis, 2017)
THU 12 APR, 19:30 – SPECIAL EVENT: The Hot Take: Masculinity at the Movies – the first in a a vital new BFI series, The Hot Take tackles burning issues in film culture.
THU 12 APR 20:35 – BFI SCREEN EPIPHANIES: Jim Howick introduces Jaws(Steven Spielberg, 1975) / Onstage: actor Jim Howick
FRI 13 APR, 18:10 – FILM PREVIEW + Q&A: Funny Cow (Adrian Shergold, 2017) / Onstage: filmmakers TBC
SAT 14 APR, ALL DAY – SPECIAL EVENT: Working-Class Heroes – a day of discussions, Q&As and screenings looking at the working-class heroes behind and in front of the camera, and asking, can working-class talent still thrive in British film in 2018?
SUN 15 APR, 14:00 – SILENT CINEMA: The Adjutant of the Czar Der Adjutant des Zaren (Vladimir Strizhevsky, 1929) + intro by Bryony Dixon, BFI Silent Film curator
MON 16 APR, 18:10 – PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE SCREENING + INTRO: Who Goes Next (Maurice Elvey, 1938) + intro by film historian Lucie Dutton
TUE 17 APR, 18:15 – TV PREVIEW + Q&A: The Bridge (BBC-Filmlance International-Nimbus Film, 2018) / Onstage: actor Sofia Helin + guests TBA
THU 19 APR, 20:45 – EXPERIMENTA: Artists, Fiction and Cinema: Staging the Stuart Croft Archive
FRI 20 APR, 20:40 – MEMBER EXCLUSIVE: ABBA: The Movie (Lasse Hallström, 1977)
SAT 21 APR, 18:20 – SPECIAL EVENT: Missing Believed Wiped Special: Rod the Mod (aka An Easter with Rod) (Francis Megahy, 1965) / Onstage: Rod Stewart and director Francis Megahy
MON 23 APR, 18:30 – SPECIAL EVENT: Mark Kermode Live in 3D at the BFI
MON 23 APR, 20:45 – SPECIAL EVENT: Mark Kermode Live in 4D at the BFI – MK4D is a new regular event at BFI Southbank, where Mark Kermode invites a special guest to talk about a film that has had a personal and lasting resonance. The Q&A will be followed by a screening of the mystery film.
TUE 24 APR, 20:15 – FILM PREVIEW + Q&A: Beast (Michael Pearce, 2017) / Onstage: cast and crew TBC
WED 25 APR, 20:40 – BFI FLARE PREVIEW: The Wound Inxeba (John Trengove, 2016)
VARIOUS DATES: FAMILY SCREENINGS of: Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978), The Boy Who Wanted To Be A Bear Drengen Der Ville Gøre Det (Jannik Hastrup, 2002), Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989) and Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2017)

NEW AND RE-RELEASES

FROM MON 2 APR: Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1958) – Part of WOODFALL
FROM FRI 6 APR: 120 BPM 120 battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017)
FROM FRI 13 APR: A Fistful of Dollars Per un pugno di dollari (Sergio Leone, 1964) – Part of SERGIO LEONE
FROM FRI 20 APR: Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017) – Part of CLOSE UP: VALESKA GRISEBACH
FROM FRI 27 APR: The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932)

BIG SCREEN CLASSICS: THE TIMELESS FILMS WE URGE YOU TO SEE

Money makes the world go around. Money is the root of all evil. It empowers, corrupts, creates, destroys, divides and rules. It brings happiness and inequality, provokes envy and avarice, arouses pride and passion, inspires ambition and criminality. Money, conspicuous by its presence or its absence, influences all our lives. So it’s a great, important and inescapable subject in the movies. A film from BIG SCREEN CLASSICS: Money, Money, Money… will screen every day for the special price of £8:

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
The Bad Sleep Well Warui yatsu hodo yoko nemuru (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
Manila: In the Claws of Light Maynila sa mga kuko ng liwanag (Lino Brocka, 1975)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Xala (Ousmane Sembène, 1975) + Borom Sarret The Wagoner (Ousmane Sembène, 1963)
The Big City Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray, 1963)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)
The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)