On Sunday, Todd Haynes’ Safe plays on 35mm at The Cinema Museum as part of Lost Reels’ Women on the Edge all-dayer.
Monday, at Close-Up, Beyond Human Time, a season of films that reject the anthropocentric, opens with Il Buco, a near-wordless slow cinema procedural following the descent into Italy’s Abisso del Bifurto. Passing Through Paris — three shorts on the city’s cemeteries, borrowed architecture, and African migrants — screens at BFI Southbank as part of A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror, with a discussion led by Abiba Coulibaly. Starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight is at The Nickel. The Regent Street Cinema Monday Classic Matinee is Ben-Hur, William Wyler’s swords-and-sandals epic.
Tuesday, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Bryan Forbes’ claustrophobic kidnap thriller starring Kim Stanley, is projected from a 35mm BFI National Archive print at BFI Southbank, introduced by David McGillivray. Cosmos, Żuławski’s final film, plays at The Garden Cinema. Apichatpong’s Memoria is at Close-Up. The Nickel has Black Magic Rites, Renato Polselli’s deranged 1973 vampire horror.
Wednesday, a busy day: Castle Cinema has Demme’s digital-shot wedding film Rachel Getting Married, introduced by Pamela Hutchinson. The Rio screens Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, introduced by NTS’s Margeaux “Self-Soothe” Labat. At the ICA: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s slippery performance piece docusoap Paradise — Nathan Fielder by way of the Berlin gallery world — is followed by the artists in conversation. Quo Vadis?, Enrico Guazzoni’s seminal 1913 epic, screens transpontine at the Cinema Museum, joined by piano accompaniment and a programme of classical-inspired shorts. Dalston Superstore plays Cronenberg’s eXistenZ from a pristine VHS copy, courtesy of TRANSMISSIONS and Rio staple Dream Emulator. At Brixton Community Cinema, Hussein Shariffe’s essay film The Dislocation of Amber — pulled from this year’s Berlinale Forum in solidarity with the Palestine Film Institute — is paired with El Said’s Of Dust and Rubies: A Film on Suspension, a 2020 documentary grappling with how to present Shariffe’s final, unfinished film — afterwards, writer Eiman Hussein, daughter of Shariffe, is in conversation.
Thursday, over at Somerset House, Molkarin, the Yugantar Film Collective’s account of domestic workers organising in Pune, India, is joined by Idi Katha Maatramena and followed by a chat between Jemma Desai and filmmaker Alia Syed. Ten Days’ Wonder, starring Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins, is at BFI Southbank introduced by Chabrol season curator Catherine Wheatley. Soldier Girls, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s documentary on a cohort of young women in US Army basic training, shows at the ICA for Contemporary 75, followed by a Q&A with the directors. Camp Classics at The Castle Cinema has Female Trouble. Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro is at Close-Up.
Friday, Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest opens its 16th edition at The Rio with Queer Ground, a programme tracing queer belonging through landscape and archive: Haneem Christian’s Eyes to See precedes the world premiere of Siân A. Williams’ Body/Land, with Williams in conversation afterwards. For the sleepless and esoteric, Eternity’s Pillar, Alice Coltrane’s devotional TV show, plays late-nite at the same venue. Hoxton’s Hundred Years Gallery hosts Food on Film, an experimental programme of 16mm shorts that treat food as material, provocation, and mess. Ruth Leitman attends a Q&A for Wildwood, NJ, the portrait of the Jersey Shore boardwalk she made with Carol Weaks Cassidy, screening with Michael Lucid’s Dirty Girls at BFI Southbank. Women & Cocaine presents a newly restored version of Joan Crawford’s most elusive film — Letty Lynton — at the Cinema Museum. The Prince Charles Cinema doubles up on Prince with Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge. And at Close-Up: Cuadro negro, a deadpan docu-fiction embedded in Chile’s army equestrian unit, is introduced by ICA cinema curator Cici Peng.
Saturday, Plane Film, Orla Smith’s exposure-therapy first-person documentary and winner of the inaugural Final d’Or at The Final Film Festival, screens at Curzon Bloomsbury, with the director in conversation afterwards. Category H returns to The Rio with another double bill: Christopher Speeth’s 1973 cult oddity Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is paired with the similarly carnival Final Destination 3. Fringe! continues at Genesis with Common Ground, a shorts programme on queer community built around weightlifting, zine-making, pageantry, and an all-lesbian ranch. And BFI Southbank‘s A Poet with a Camera continues with Rebellion, three newly 4K-restored Maldoror shorts circling poet and politician Aimé Césaire.
Sunday, a rare screening of Todd Haynes’ Safe on 35mm anchors Women on the Edge, Lost Reels’ all-day takeover of the Cinema Museum, which also features a new restoration of Butterfly Kiss alongside Girlfight and Kissed, with Q&As from Julie Baines and Karyn Kusama (online). Dance, Girl, Dance, Dorothy Arzner’s backstage burlesque starring Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara, is on 35mm at BFI Southbank. Contemporary 75 continues at The Rio with In Protest of the Bomb, a programme of two milestone anti-nuclear-activism documentaries from the 1950s and 1980s. The Prince Charles Cinema has Out of the Blue. And at The Nickel there’s a chance to see Sean Price Williams’ 16mm-shot picaresque The Sweet East.
Until next time