The BFI today announced the dates for the 2026 edition of BFI Flare. The festival, which screens the best in contemporary LGBTQIA+ cinema from around the globe—in addition to a rich selection of events and archive titles—is celebrating its 40th year and will run from 18th–29th March 2026 at BFI Southbank. This year’s festival sees the 12th year of #FiveFilmsForFreedom in partnership with the British Council. This landmark initiative presents five films for free to audiences globally and invites everyone everywhere to show solidarity with LGBT communities in countries where freedom and equal rights are limited.
The 2025 FFFF selections came from Indonesia, New Zealand, the USA/China, and the UK, and the digital campaign attracted over 3 million views. Since 2015, Five Films For Freedom has showcased 55 films over 132 days, reaching audiences of over 28 million in 220 countries and principalities. The 2026 Five Films for Freedom shorts will be available to watch for free UK-wide on BFI Player. Submissions for all film lengths for the 2026 edition of Flare are now open, and will close on Friday 5 December. Further details will be revealed in the coming months, with the full programme set to be announced in February.
International Film Festival Rotterdam has unveiled its first selections for Cinema Regained, IFFR’s realm for rethinking film history, which will once again present recent restorations and works that offer new perspectives on cinema’s past. Celebrating their world premieres at IFFR 2026 as part of the Cinema Regained programme will be Hungarian avant-garde master Péter Lichter’s The Thing in the Coffin (2026)—an appropriated footage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and Ryan A. White and A.P. Pickle’s doc Mickey & Richard (2026).
Among the restorations featured, audiences will discover Tracing to Expo '70 (1970)—a dazzling mix of musical, travelogue and mystery, which looks at the first World Exposition held in Asia—and Gerald Potterton’s Tiki Tiki (1971), a crazy meta-movie featuring animated monkeys making a live-action Soviet-style fantasy epic. Additional restorations will come from Brazil, Mexico and the Czech Republic, while further attempts at making new sense of film history will be provided by directors from Germany, France and Italy.
Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director at IFFR, said: "Cinema Regained reflects the way IFFR approaches cinema: by returning to works and histories that deserve a more attentive place in the conversation. Cinema Regained continues to open up new ways of reading the past, presenting restorations, archival discoveries and experiments that shift how we understand film history. This programme offers audiences a perspective that is informed, curious and grounded in the belief that cinema’s past remains essential to how we read the present".
Given that her career spans nearly 40 years, it is hard to believe that, prior to her remarkable new film The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović had made just three feature films: Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015), and Earwig (2021). In their respective years, all of these excellent Belgian co-productions played at the London Film Festival, and her latest film continued this trend with two screenings at the 2025 LFF. But four features do not tell the whole story: in addition to making a few shorts, Hadžihalilović has produced several films directed by her partner and frequent collaborator Gaspar Noé—who has a notable acting role in The Ice Tower—including Lux Æterna, Vortex, and I Stand Alone, the last of which she also edited.
Earlier this year, the 70s-set The Ice Tower played as one of the silent screenings at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, which Hadžihalilović attended 20 years after Innocence was selected for the same event. While the latter film has often been described as a dark fairy tale, Hadžihalilović’s latest effort is more directly inspired by the work of the master of the genre, Hans Christian Andersen. As with all of her previous features, The Ice Tower focuses firmly on children, following runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who takes shelter in a film studio where an adaptation of Andersen’s 1844 short story "The Snow Queen"—starring the haughty Cristina (Marion Cotillard) in the title role—is in production.
Jeanne is fascinated by both the fairy story and the lead actress, and once the teenager’s presence in the studio becomes known, Cristina begins to reciprocate her attention. It is by no means a symmetrical relationship—as one might expect, the imperious Cristina clearly calls the shots—but the two develop a strange bond as the film shoot progresses (a bewigged Noé is good value as the slightly seedy director of the film-within-the-film). Just as Cristina is inhabiting a role, Jeanne—thanks to a stolen ID—also adopts a persona of her own, assuming the name Bianca. The game between the pair is as engrossing as it is disconcerting, and newcomer Pacini impresses opposite the Oscar-winning Cotillard.
The Ice Tower (French: La tour de glace), true to its title, is glacially paced, but it is also a hypnotic, immersive, and deeply unsettling work. As the film advances, the worlds inside and outside of "The Snow Queen" begin to overlap, eventually shifting back and forth so fluidly that they become almost impossible to separate. Hadžihalilović's meticulous mise-en-scène is greatly enhanced by the work of Earwig’s returning cinematographer, Jonathan Ricquebourg (also DoP on the Larrieu brothers’ Tralala), who expertly captures the wintry light that envelops both realms featured here. The Ice Tower feels like the ultimate refinement of what Lucile Hadžihalilović has been developing throughout her impeccable feature film career; this is a, ahem, towering piece of real cinema from a major filmmaker.
