My Stolen Planet (Farahnaz Sharifi, 2024)

The Iranian revolution of 1979 led to the overthrow of the Shah's monarchy and the return from exile of Ruhollah Khomeini.  The insurrection marked a significant watershed for Iran, one which saw the start of both the Islamic Republic and Khomeini's decade-long stint as premier.  As the 1980s dawned, Iran's efforts to install a new political system based on Islamic principles caused fractious relations with other countries, particularly the US, with the Iran hostage crisis—a standoff that actually began before the official commencement of Khomeini's tenure—resulting in real diplomatic strain between the two nations.

The shadow of the revolution palpably hangs over essay film My Stolen Planet, which tracks the life of its Iranian maker, Farahnaz Sharifi, who was born in 1979.  The accident of Sharifi's birth year is largely what drives My Stolen Planet, as she recounts how her experience of pre-revolution Iran is limited to secondhand stories and distressed film reels (more on those later).  Through candid footage, we witness the duality of daily life in Tehran, where private freedom is juxtaposed with public oppression.  Part diary, part political commentary, My Stolen Planet is very much about memory, both individual and collective.

Sharifi's tale is one of curiosity and discovery as she navigates the intricacies of her identity in a society where questions are, in the main, neither welcomed nor valued.  She obsessively collects strangers' 8mm home movies—featuring birthday parties and so on—in the process assembling a collage of yesteryear that conveys an image of a quite different Iran.  Poignant excerpts from these films form the emotional core of My Stolen Planet, and the end credits include an appeal to help identify those featured; Sharifi laments how so many treasured recordings ended up discarded by owners fearful of the post-revolution government.

Yet it is these old films that allow the director to form a connection to the past, and she uses them to fill in the blanks of her own life, finding a commonality between herself and these ghosts.  My Stolen Planet may be steeped in a Resnaisian obsession with the Before Times, but it still has room for more recent events—such as Sharifi's mother's fight against Alzheimer's disease, and the civil unrest that followed the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini, both of which, in very different ways, underline the great importance of remembering.  Amini's death inspired the title track of Waddinxveen band Within Temptation's Bleed Out, a song which, like Sharifi's film, is a quite unique meditation on identity, freedom and memory.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime (1/9/26–6/10/26)

This autumn BFI celebrates Claude Chabrol’s cool, precise, entertaining and deliciously wicked thrillers with a BFI Southbank season, Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime, running from 1 September–6 October, including the BFI Distribution rerelease of La Femme infidèle (1969) in the UK and Ireland on 11 September. The first of Chabrol’s great run of bourgeois psychological thrillers, La Femme infidèle is one of three of the director’s films that BFI Distribution has acquired: Le Boucher (1970) and Les Biches (1968) will also be available. A curated Chabrol BFI Player online collection will also be available for audiences UK-wide.

A number of films in the season are screening on 35mm. Often cited as the first French New Wave film, Chabrol’s first feature Le Beau Serge (1958) announced its director's preoccupation with the darker side of human nature. Shot on location in his mother’s hometown, the film uncovers violence and despair in the ordinary everydayness of provincial life. The Hatter’s Ghost (1982, pictured below), Chabrol’s underrated and often overlooked adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel, stars French screen legends Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour as two men playing a murderous game of cat and mouse.

The Cry of the Owl (1987) is a thrilling adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, where the boundaries between victim and perpetrator blur when the object of a man’s voyeuristic gaze looks back. Chabrol is arguably at his most Hitchcockian here in this homage to Rear Window. The Bridesmaid (2004) stars Benoît Magimel as a shy, somewhat passive young man who meets a woman at his sister’s wedding, falling hopelessly into an all-consuming affair. La Rupture (1970) finds Chabrol working in a more overtly melodramatic mode—and all the more disturbing and unhinged for it—in a film about the institutions that fail women.

Other titles in the season include À double tour (1959), a lurid and transgressive adaptation of Stanley Ellin’s novel starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, which prefigures the look and feel of later Hitchcockian thrillers. The Third Lover (1962) is a precise study in voyeurism and manipulation that anticipates the claustrophobic domestic dramas that would define Chabrol’s greatest period to come. Les Biches (1968), a gender-swapping riff on The Talented Mr Ripley, is a polarising work, with a story that mines the seduction of privilege and marks the beginning of Chabrol’s creative and personal partnership with Stéphane Audran.

Source/images: BFI

Lady (Samuel Abrahams, 2025)

As the great ethnographic documentarian Jean Rouch once pointed out, people will always be affected by the presence of a camera, and the relationship between filmmaker and subject is at the heart of Samuel Abrahams' terrific mockumentary Lady, which was a late—but most welcome—addition to the 2025 London Film Festival.  Abrahams' film, which received its world premiere at the LFF, features a standout performance from Sian Clifford, hitherto best known as the older sister of the title character in BBC TV series Fleabag.  In Lady, Clifford plays fame-hungry aristocrat Lady Isabella Ravenhyde, who has invited filmmaker Sam (Laurie Kynaston) into her huge stately mansion for a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Once this setup is established, Lady shifts into unexpectedly surreal territory as Isabella notices that she is gradually becoming invisible.  As this strange affliction begins to consume more of her body, Isabella grows increasingly desperate—not so much because of her condition, which she seems largely resigned to, but because she wants to be seen and recognised for her creative talents before vanishing completely.  Isabella considers herself to be a serious multidisciplinary artist, so for one final tilt at artistic validation, she decides to enter the annual talent contest she hosts for local children and, with Sam's dubious help, sets about planning a bizarre avant-garde dance sequence that she hopes will win first place.

Of course, as far as Sam is concerned, this is all grist to the mill, but his own professional and personal insecurities—neither of which are helped by Isabella's near-constant flirting—begin to bubble to the surface.  As both Lady and Sam's film progress, Isabella slowly changes from a caricature to a real, damaged person with a quite moving backstory, and she and Sam form a genuine closeness that seemed highly unlikely when the filmmaker—who one would assume is a proxy for Abrahams—first arrived at his idiosyncratic subject's door.  While there are no shortage of very funny moments in the film, it's underscored by a pathos that gradually comes to the fore as the suitably nightmarish children's talent show draws nearer.

Abrahams films the magnificent Somerleyton Hall, which stands in for Isabella's grand, sprawling home, Ravenhyde Hall, as a sad, gloomy and increasingly eerie place, one that seems to reflect the essential melancholy of its narcissistic owner.  Isabella seems oddly chained to the estate, and a scene in which she and Sam attempt to leave by car is initially played for laughs before unfolding into something more sinister; here, as in the entire film, the tonal shifts are handled quite superbly.  It is not difficult to equate the fortysomething Isabella's physical evaporation with society's firm emphasis on youth and beauty; but, like its wholly mesmerising title character, this fizzing, unique film very much demands to be seen.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI