LFF 2026: Let Them Be Seen (Nolitha R. Mkulisi, 2026)

The Xhosa‑speaking Eastern Cape of South Africa carries a distinctive rhythm shaped by its landscapes, languages, and long political memory.  Rolling hills give way to villages where isiXhosa is not just spoken but lived—woven into poetry, communal rituals, and everyday negotiations of identity.  It's a region marked by resilience: the birthplace of towering political figures, the site of fierce anti‑colonial resistance, and a place where traditions like cattle‑keeping still anchor community life.  Yet the province is also defined by movement, with many residents navigating the pull between rural homesteads and urban opportunity.

What emerges is a region that feels both rooted and restless, carrying forward a cultural confidence that continues to shape South Africa’s broader story.  Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi's feature debut Let Them Be Seen, which played earlier this year at International Film Festival Rotterdam and screens at the BFI London Film Festival today and tomorrow, is a slippery experimental documentary set in Tapoleng, the Eastern Cape village where the director grew up.  As with fellow LFF 2026 title At Night, Let Them Be Seen finds itself in the Dare strand when it would be rather less surprising to see it housed in the Experimenta section.

Tapoleng is situated near the town of Sterkspruit and close to the Lesotho border, and, like many villages in the region, is characterised by its prevalence of churches—a result of Dutch Reformed Church missionaries greatly expanding their activities in the Eastern Cape from the mid-19th century onwards.  Mkulisi includes frequent shots of these edifices as she essays daily life in Tapoleng, whose residents now look beyond the church buildings that once provided sanctuary as apartheid raged on.  The film also casts its gaze on the village's large cattle population, some of whom return this interest with an inquisitive bovine stare.

Besides these recurring shots of cows and churches, Mkulisi employs a more obscure leitmotif in the form of SABC music show Jam Alley, which is celebrated by a group of brightly wigged women as they endeavour to re-enact moments from the programme.  Mkulisi uses a mind-boggling variety of formats as she captures the essence of this largely forgotten community, for whom the spaza shop serves as a social hub; the countless small interruptions endured by the store's owner as he explains Rastafarianism are almost a running gag in this singular hybrid documentary, which is at once fluid and discordant.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: The Day I Became a Bird (Rob Madden, 2026)

The 2023 short film The Day I Became a Bird distils Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Ruhemann's gift for delicate, emotionally resonant storytelling into a brief but luminous coming‑of‑age tale.  The film follows Frank, a boy who becomes so overwhelmed by his bird-obsessed first crush that he painstakingly constructs an avian-inspired costume, wearing it to school as his feelings outgrow the limits of his small world.  Ruhemann treats this metamorphosis not as fantasy spectacle but as a metaphor for the strangeness of early longing—that sudden sense of becoming other, becoming noticeable, becoming vulnerable.

With its soft visual palette and gentle pacing, the tender film captures the awkward poetry of childhood desire, offering a story that feels both whimsically surreal and quietly, universally true.  The short was made using the Unity engine, and after its release it emerged that Ruhemann's company, Passion Pictures, was working with Dundee indie studio Hyper Luminal on a videogame adaptation of the film.  The finished work is one of five titles featured in the BFI London Film Festival's Games Lounge, which forms part of LFF Expanded and is located in the BFI IMAX, where it is available for the festival's duration.

The four‑chapter game is available on Steam, PlayStation and Nintendo, and I played the Steam version.  I did encounter one notable bug, which caused the game to crash repeatedly at a point where the player is prompted to flip over a school chalkboard.  In the end, the workaround involved temporarily turning the master audio volume all the way down, after which the chapter played out smoothly.  Other than this, there were no performance issues of note.  As the game—like the film—is primarily aimed at younger children, the controls are nice and simple, and can be further streamlined via the menu's accessibility options.

The game sticks closely to both the film's story and its hand‑drawn art style, as Frank undertakes his quest to catch the eye of Sylvia, his dream girl.  As such, it carries the same effortless charm as its source material (which in turn was based on the eponymous book), and its gentle challenges make for a pleasant and relaxing couple of hours.  While you could barrel through the game in under an hour, that approach seems contrary to its mellow sensibilities, which extend to omitting the film's scenes of Frank being picked on by his unthinking classmates.  For such a short game, the RRP is a little steep—although the Steam version includes a download of the film—but it's a title worth picking up at a reduced price.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel, 2026)

Colonial rule in the Philippines unfolded as a long, layered encounter that reshaped the archipelago's political and cultural landscape.  Spanish authority, beginning in the 16th century, brought Catholicism, new administrative structures, and a rigid social hierarchy that often clashed with deeply rooted local traditions.  Towns grew around churches and plazas, while tribute systems and forced labour pulled communities into the orbit of imperial demands.  Yet Filipinos continually negotiated, resisted, and adapted—preserving indigenous languages, asserting regional identities, and nurturing nationalist thought.

By the time American rule followed in 1898, the islands had already set the stage for modern struggles over sovereignty and cultural self‑definition.  Dutch co-production Filipiñana—which has the last of its four screenings at Film Fest Gent today before playing at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday—is a film in which the weight of Filipino history is almost palpable.  Rafael Manuel's feature debut is based on his eponymous short film from 2020; both films star Jorrybell Agoto as Isabel, a young woman working at an exclusive Manila country club, where she places golf balls on tees at the driving range.

In another sop to the egos of the course's wealthy patrons—none of whom are professional golfers—an all-female team of caddies are on hand.  While there is a drought in Metro Manila—and the country club workers are toiling away in sweltering temperatures—both the golf course and its clientele enjoy a seemingly endless supply of cool, refreshing water.  Isabel becomes intrigued by the club's reptilian president, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), who accidentally leaves behind a golf iron that Isabel is tasked with returning, triggering a tense walk through areas of the complex that are normally off-limits to golf course employees.

Manuel's film appears to be a formalist exercise, one whose immaculately-composed shots and sly digs at the class system are undermined by problematic pacing; the knowledge that the film's genesis lies in a 24-minute short is apt to fuel the opinion that the material has been laboriously stretched to feature length.  Dubious editing choices aside, there's much to admire about Filipiñana: Agoto makes for a suitably engaging lead, 100 Nights of Hero DoP Xenia Patricia's lensing is astonishing, and Manuel's adroitness in making the golf course a microcosm of Filipino society—both past and present—belies his relative inexperience.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Film Fest Gent

LFF 2026: Mixtape (Johnny Galvatron, 2026)

Founded and spearheaded by musician Johnny Galvatron, Australian indie videogame developer Beethoven & Dinosaur feels like a studio powered by the glow of imagination itself.  There's a playful eccentricity in the way the team approaches game design, as if they're chasing the perfect blend of rock‑opera spectacle and heartfelt storytelling.  The studio and Galvatron's first game, the quirky 2021 platformer The Artful Escape, showed a collective instinct for turning introspective themes into something dazzling and theatrical, wrapping self‑doubt, identity, and creative ambition in shimmering cosmic pageantry.

Galvatron's sophomore effort, the stop motion-inspired Mixtape, is one of five titles featured in the BFI London Film Festival's Games Lounge, which forms part of LFF Expanded and is located in the BFI IMAX, where it is available for the entirety of this year's festival.  The other titles selected for the Games Lounge are short film adaptation The Day I Became a Bird, Italian puzzle adventure Lofsöng, interactive visual novel and Roger, and devilish precision platformer Love Eternal.  As with The Artful Escape, Mixtape is available on Xbox, PC, PlayStation and Nintendo; for this review, I played the Xbox version, and it ran smoothly.

The 90s-set Mixtape is very much a story-focused game that follows three teenage friends after their high school days have come to an end, with Stacey Rockford (Bella DeLong) serving as the protagonist.  Stacey is flanked by Cassandra Morino (Jessica Ma) and Van Slater (Max Korman) as the trio set about tracking down some alcohol to take to a party that coincides with Stacey's last night in town.  Stacey, who wants to be a music supervisor, has curated the soundtrack for this final day (and, in a nice meta flourish, the game itself), which includes tracks from The Cure, Joy Division, Lush, Devo, and Iggy Pop, among others.

Given that the line separating movies from videogames—especially since the advent of the ninth generation of consoles—has become increasingly blurred, it's no surprise to find that Mixtape offers an experience fairly close to an interactive film.  While the game provides some haptically satisfying moments—the thunk of a baseball hitting the player's bat, a skateboard ride peppered with exploding objects—these don't distract from its emotional core.  There's a touching universality to the ending—which put me in mind of the closing moments of Stranger Things—as Galvatron and his team sweetly capture the end of an era.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: At Night (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)

The late American poet Alice Notley's work feels like a continuous act of defiance against the limits poetry tries to place on itself.  Across decades, she carved out a voice that was at once intimate and insurgent, folding grief, feminism, myth, and everyday survival into sprawling, incantatory lines that refused neat containment.  Her poems often read like conversations overheard from another dimension—raw, restless, and fiercely protective of the inner lives women are told to quiet.  Notley's commitment to pushing past convention made her a lodestar for poets who see the page not as a boundary but as a site of ongoing rebellion, where language can be remade in the image of a life lived uncompromisingly.

Notley's work—particularly her epic poem The Descent of Alette—underpins Beatrice Gibson's feature debut At Night, which was presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart in 2024 and screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday and Tuesday.  Gibson established herself as a filmmaker through several experimental shorts, including IFFR Tiger Award winner The Tiger's Mind, and it's mildly surprising to find that, for all its experimental form, At Night has been placed in the LFF's Dare strand.  That said, the film is a more accessible work than what is typically found in the festival's ever-fascinating Experimenta section.

True to its title, At Night is a nocturnal odyssey through a Paris in which the bulk of its residents appear to have turned in for the evening.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop against which a number of women voice their hopes and fears.  One such woman, filmmaker B—deftly played by Gibson herself—is visiting Paris to scout for locations for an upcoming project.  While in the French capital, B attempts to contact her old friend Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who once worked for B as a childminder; Didi lives in Belleville—where B is looking at potential locations—but appears to have been ghosting B for quite some time.

Gibson's film, which is wonderfully photographed (in 16mm) by Mare's Nest director Ben Rivers, opens up to include the stories of other women, such as Sophie Robinson's poet, who, in one of At Night's most striking scenes, recites one of her works to a roomful of people.  It is safe to assume that Robinson—like Gibson and the other women featured in this slippery film—is playing a once-removed version of herself.  The poetry of Notley, who died during production, is heard via a voiceover she recorded especially for this project after she became too ill to fulfil her planned onscreen role.  As such, Notley is a ghostly, ethereal presence, one who always seems to hover around the edges of this beguilingly original piece of autofiction.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: Ken Russell's The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)

Ken Russell's French-set film The Devils is back on the big screen as part of this year's BFI London Film Festival, where it plays on Friday and Monday ahead of a wider global release that commences in the US.  It is difficult to overstate the importance of this hell-freezes-over moment: not only are Warner Bros.—the studio that for so long seemed intent on burying the film—behind this re-release, but The Devils has been restored in 4K and cut to Russell's specific instructions (he worked with the film's original editor, Michael Bradsell, to reinstate long-lost scenes that had fallen foul of censorship).  Fifty-five years on from its initial run and 15 years after its director's death, the result is the definitive version of a work that—even in its previously truncated forms—stands as the blazing apex of Russell's career.

Russell's 1971 shocker, set in 17th-century Loudun, centres on Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a rakish and arrogant secular priest who finds himself in deep trouble when Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the abbess of the local Ursuline convent, accuses him of sorcery.  These baseless claims prove most convenient for several influential individuals who are scheming to remove Grandier from his dual posts; the priest is also Loudun's acting governor, and has so far thwarted Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), who wishes to destroy the city's walls on the rationale that such fortifications provide a bedrock for further Protestant uprisings.  Grandier is therefore a political heretic who is tried as a religious one, with the Catholic church he's served for so long gleefully facilitating his terrible, fiery end.

While basking in the magnificence of Ken Russell's The Devils—note the possessive title credit, which serves to differentiate this edit from the cut versions—it is easy to forget that, from the 1980s on, Russell had fallen out of fashion, and those championing his work were few and far between (it didn't help that The Devils, the main exhibit for those coming to Russell's defence, was a tricky title to track down).  But less than six months after Russell's death, the BFI, having somehow secured the rights from Warner Bros., released The Devils as a double-disc DVD that led to renewed interest in both the film and its maker.  While this edition was the UK theatrical version, the missing scenes had been broadcast in a 2002 documentary, resulting in several fan edits that aimed to reproduce Russell's original vision.

Yet back in 2004, Russell and Bradsell had pieced together their own reconstruction of the film, and this served as the basis for this new restoration, which was completed using the original camera negative.  There's something bittersweet about the whole venture: while Russell lived to recreate his greatly preferred cut of the film—a situation that was obviously unthinkable prior to the recovery of the excised footage—he died with the assumption that it would never be given a fittingly wide release.  In my book on the film, my adamantine stance was that The Devils works perfectly well without the restored scenes—a heresy seemingly greater than anything that transpired in Loudun—and, up until now, it has had no other choice. If this is your first time with this unique, shattering film, prepare to be blown away.

  

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

White Guilt (Marcus Flemmings, 2025)

Marcus Flemmings’ latest feature White Guilt was one of a number of horror films that screened at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, an edition in which the genre offerings were particularly strong; other selections in the same strand included hyper-stylised giallo Saturnalia, body horror Thinestra, and Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation Snatchers.  Over the course of the past nine years, prolific Londoner Flemmings has directed four other features—Reach!, Blonde. Purple, Palindrome and Six Rounds—and has also written and produced Before Nikkah, a film directed by White Guilt's cinematographer Haider Zafar.

White Guilt sees a group of white, wealthy (and presumably quite bored) millennials board a bus to an ex-plantation; each has paid a not inconsiderable sum to experience an inversion of the scenario that once played out on this property.  Thus, these white people act as slaves, while several black masters mete out harsh treatment to their charges.  The lines appear to be clearly drawn, until one of the last members to join the programme, the mixed-race Sally (Temica Thompson), threatens to derail the dynamic; it's quite obvious from the masters' faces that this is the first time that someone of this ethnicity has signed up for the event.

How the masters respond to this conundrum is quite predictable, as they double down on punishing Sally, a process which culminates in a startlingly brutal scene that proves that this whole setup is far removed from the realm of cosplay.  Rattled, the members of the group realise they've underestimated the severity of this immersive experience, and one of the cohort, David (Theo Watt), is on the brink of using a gun he smuggled in; David plans on defending Ellie (Freya Crompton), who, despite having been threatened with sexual violence, wants no such protection from this would-be white knight (pun intended).

It transpires that David is descended from the onetime owners of the plantation, but this only partly explains his presence in the group, as there's an even more personal reason for his being there.  This UK production—which, it should be said, features the occasional wobbly accent—sees the south of England stand in for the southern US, to good effect, and there's a universality to the tricky question it poses: how, exactly, should we deal with racial guilt?  The coruscating White Guilt may not offer a solution, but it makes it clear that the answer does not lie in enrolling in a circus like this, which degrades everyone involved.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Oorlog in tijden van kunst: Film Fest Gent (7–18/10/26)

Van 7 tot 18 oktober wordt de stad Gent opnieuw het decor voor meer dan 100 langspeelfilms, 40 kortfilms, 2 VR-projecten en 23 documentaires uit 49 verschillende landen.  Van veelbelovende debuutfilms tot meervoudige prijswinnaars, één ding hebben de films op het programma alvast gemeenschappelijk: ze tonen aan dat  kunst in deze onzekere tijden belangrijker is dan ooit.  In openingsfilm Coward van Lukas Dhont proberen jonge soldaten voor even aan de gruwelen van de loopgraven te ontsnappen door muzikale voorstellingen op te voeren.

Slotfilm Le Faux Soir van Michaël R. Roskam toont dan weer hoe verbeelding ook een krachtige daad van verzet kan zijn.  Maar het hoeven niet altijd grote heldendaden te zijn.  Vaak zijn het net de kleine, alledaagse verhalen die de moeite zijn om te vertellen.  Hoe ga je om met een echtscheiding, een gendertransitie of overspel wanneer er oorlog uitbreekt?  Hoe breng je jeugdherinneringen weer tot leven wanneer je opgroeide in conflict?  Ook Éric Rohmer wist als geen ander dat kleine verhalen misschien wel de grootste zijn.  Doorheen zijn kleurrijke oeuvre, dat vertoond wordt tijdens het Classics programma.

Niet alleen film, maar ook (film)muziek wordt opnieuw in de spreekwoordelijke schijnwerpers gezet.  Tijdens de Film Music Days verzamelen componisten van over de hele wereld in Gent voor talks, workshops en masterclasses over de kunst van het componeren, waaronder Guests of Honour Trevor Jones en Hildur Guðnadóttir, en creatieve partners Volker Bertelmann en Edward Berger.  Videodroom, in samenwerking met VIERNULVIER, gaat dan weer de experimentele toer op, met nieuw geschreven, live gebrachte soundtracks voor cultklassiekers.

Source/images: Film Fest Gent

Formosa Beach (Julia de Simone, 2024)

More than 35 years ago, the late Huub Bals—creator and director of International Film Festival Rotterdam—began setting up what was then known as the Tarkovsky Fund, a body intended to support filmmakers in the developing world.  Following his death, the fund was renamed the Hubert Bals Fund, or HBF, and since its launch it has assisted in the production of countless critical hits, including Memoria, Monos and Japón.  Both IFFR and the HBF are involved in Julia de Simone's long-gestating feature debut Formosa Beach: an HBF grant was awarded to the project way back in 2014, with the finished film premiering at IFFR 2024.

Formosa Beach examines, inter alia, colonial history in Brazil, as seen through the eyes of Brazilian native de Simone, and the resulting film is a languid reflection on the vagaries of both time and memory.  The temporally fragmented narrative of Formosa Beach follows the journey of Muanza (Lucília Raimundo), a woman trafficked from the Kingdom of Kongo to Rio de Janeiro (while the Portuguese influence in Kongo was intricately linked with commerce, religion and politics, it was slavery that left an indelible mark).  In Brazil, Muanza meets fellow slave Kieza (Samira Carvalho), with whom she plots an escape.

The now-defunct Kingdom of Kongo encompassed parts of several present-day countries (Angola, DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon); established in the late 14th century, the kingdom was a centralised state with a sophisticated governmental structure, and its wealth was mostly founded on nefarious trades (ivory, slaves).  Many Kongolese people like Muanza were forcibly taken to Brazil, where, despite the brutal conditions they had to endure, they contributed significantly to the country's culture; indeed, the influence of the Kongolese can be seen in several aspects of contemporary Brazilian life, including music and cuisine.

Julia de Simone's dedication to examining the legacies of slavery and colonialism—and their impact on current society—is obvious in a film in which the two strong, stoic protagonists are boxed in to both their environment and the film's Academy ratio.  Formosa Beach's back-and-forth narrative and critique of European imperialism combine in a way that recalls Bertrand Bonello's unsettling Zombi Child, an altogether more sophisticated picture.  De Simone's ambitious film is better in idea than execution: it works well enough as an aesthetically pleasing mood piece, yet its story feels both underpowered and undertold.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Regina (Ashley De Grandy, 2025)

Setting aside the mild controversy regarding the nomenclature confusion surrounding Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's final feature film was the digitally-shot Inland Empire, a byzantine work somewhat reductively billed as "a mystery about a woman in trouble".  This same description could also apply to both Lynch's previous film, Mulholland Drive, and Ashley De Grandy’s debut feature, Regina, a movie for which Inland Empire appears to serve as a key reference point.  It feels oddly apt that the tail end of David Lynch's career in cinema provides a template of sorts for a film that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.

On a superficial level, Regina could be distilled to "a woman searching for her cat", as the title character (Isabella Bobadilla) scours the neighbourhood for the moggy she hasn't seen for quite some time.  Regina is aided in this quest by her good friend Daisy (Loren Swan), and the pair plaster the streets with posters appealing for the return of the missing pet.  So far, so linear, but, as with Inland Empire, Regina eventually reaches a tipping point where the narrative splinters into a cluster of jagged fragments, and Regina, like Laura Dern's Nikki in Lynch's film, finds herself in a terrifying twilight world in which little is recognisable.

Also as with Inland Empire, Regina is a film in which prostitution plays a murky role, and Regina finds herself an unwilling participant in a seedy arrangement presided over by her mother (musician Roxana Frontini).  As Regina's life disintegrates further, the hunt for her cat is largely erased from both her and the viewer's memories; while it's not clear if the feline even existed in the first place, it's pretty obvious that the search for it is nothing more than a MacGuffin that sets up the title character's nightmarish ordeal.  As reality bends and warps, Ashley De Grandy deftly steers this ambitious film through its choppy, elliptical back half.

With its depiction of the horrors that lie beneath the sun-dappled surface, Regina, which premiered at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, is instantly identifiable as being influenced by the work of David Lynch, yet this is no mere pastiche (in terms of homage, another film that debuted at the same festival, Saturnalia, sailed much closer to the wind as it mimicked the work of Dario Argento).  De Grandy has injected enough of her own filmmaking personality into Regina to elevate it beyond an ersatz Lynch, and she's helped by a brave, confident turn from Bobadilla, who glues the film together as Regina's sanity unravels.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

The Treasury of Human Inheritance (A. K. Mitchell, 2024)

Treasury of Human Inheritance, a series published from 1909 to 1958, represents an important milestone in the history of genetics.  This project—co-published as Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, which, even more confusingly, also served as Treasury's parent publication for a time—was overseen by Karl Pearson, a leading biostatistician and eugenicist.  Treasury of Human Inheritance sought to compile and analyse family pedigrees in order to illustrate the inheritance of physical and mental diseases in humans; the initiative sprang from of a need for hard empirical evidence to support studies in heredity.

During the first half of the twentieth century, access to such information was very limited, and Pearson's object was to standardise the data collected.  Treasury's evolution into an independent series reflected the growing emphasis on, and appetite for, genetic research.  However, Treasury—as the title of its sometime sister journal makes clear—is also bound to the murky field of eugenics, a sub-Darwinian belief system that aims to improve the human gene pool via selective breeding.  Nowadays, eugenics is rightly debunked, but the import attached to Treasury is a reminder that this outré theory was once considered a credible one.

For all its experimental form, Alexis Kyle Mitchell's film The Treasury of Human Inheritance—note the subtle use of the definite article, which is very handy when it comes to differentiating the movie from its near-namesake periodical—is an intensely personal work centring on myotonic dystrophy (DM), a hereditary muscle-wasting genetic disorder whose potency increases as it is passed on.  Via a dissonant combination of home movies, Zoom calls, and footage of derelict buildings, Canadian artist Mitchell poignantly depicts the ravages of this disease, which has affected three generations of the filmmaker's family.

The film is propelled along by a throbbing synth soundtrack which, as per Mitchell's stated intention, approximates particular patterns of genetic conditions.  This approach to sound design adds a haptic, visceral element to the work that complements the tactile 16mm cinematography; as much as Mitchell's film provides real insight into life with DM, it is also an experience, and a highly sensorial one at that.  The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a peculiar nexus of art and science, one which confronts the stark realities of disease, death and dying—not as alien concepts, but rather as integral aspects of the human condition.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Raindance 2026: Paul

The idiosyncratic Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté has carved out a singular place in contemporary cinema, building films that feel at once austere, playful, and quietly disarming.  Working largely from the margins of Québec's film industry, he gravitates toward characters who exist just outside the rhythms of ordinary life—hermits, drifters, workers, people whose inner worlds are more vivid than their surroundings.  His style is deceptively simple: long, patient takes; a wry sense of humour that never tips into mockery; and a fascination with the textures of everyday spaces.  Yet beneath that calm surface, his films pulse with curiosity about how people construct meaning when no one is watching.

Côté's work resists easy categorisation, but that’s precisely its appeal: each film feels like an invitation to observe, to linger, and to reconsider what a story can be.  His latest film, Paul—a documentary that screens on Wednesday and Thursday at this year's Raindance Film Festival—certainly adheres to this template as it follows the subject of the title, an introverted thirtysomething Montrealer doing all he can to change his life.  The bilingual Paul is looking to improve both his mental and physical wellbeing, and a large chunk of his week is spent deep-cleaning apartments, each invariably owned by a bossy woman who puts Paul through his paces as he scrubs away at the bathroom and kitchen until they shine.

Paul receives a great deal of pleasure from this work—but no payment.  It’s clear that the therapeutic benefits are what drive him, and he uploads videos of his vigorous cleaning sessions to Instagram, where he’s been gaining quite a following (which brings its own kind of anxiety).  We watch Paul’s films within Côté’s film, and as Paul unfolds we see its subject becoming increasingly adept at shooting and editing his reels—perhaps a result of spending time with a seasoned filmmaker?  The late nights he spends assembling these videos earn him a scolding from one particular maîtresse, who doesn’t seem to appreciate that a long day of cleaning leaves Paul only a few hours to catch up on his fledgling work as an influencer.

Early in the film, Paul openly admits to blocking out memories of much of his past life, and it’s as safe as it is sad to assume that he was often an object of ridicule.  Yet Côté’s approach is always non‑judgmental, and while he’s not afraid to sprinkle humour throughout, it is never at his subject’s expense.  As the film progresses, it does verge on the repetitive as Paul ricochets from one gruelling domme‑led cleaning assignment to the next, but for the most part this is a sensitive and absorbing portrait of someone navigating a daunting world, one in which he is more or less invisible.  Yet Paul is underscored by a growing sense of optimism, and Denis Côté expertly captures his subject’s hopeful longing for connection.

Darren Arnold

Images: Métropole Films