Deep Focus: 8 — 14 December
Experimental Mexican shorts in Barking, Category H's late nights return to the Rio, and Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned continues at the ICA...
Biombo de Acapulco/Acapulco Folding Screen screens at Barking’s A House for Artists on Thursday as part of Afterimage, Afterlife, a programme of experimental Mexican shorts.
Monday, LRB Screen continues its season of depictions of London by non-British filmmakers with Here for Life, featuring Gareth Evans in conversation with director Andrea Luka Zimmerman at The Garden Cinema. Figures in a Landscape is at the Barbican, closing the film programme of Lucy Raven: Rounds. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Martin Ritt’s le Carré adaptation starring Richard Burton is in NFT1, introduced by Burton’s granddaughter, Charlotte Frances Burton. Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night is at Close-Up, featuring a post-screening discussion between the director and Umi Ishihara. Genesis Cinema hosts a screening of Bertolucci’s The Conformist, in association with Tower Hamlets Trades Council’s Resisting the Far-Right season. Regent Street Cinema’s Monday Matinée is Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.
Tuesday, the ICA’s innovative Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season continues with Literary Adaptation I: Guy de Maupassant, a programme of film adaptations by Godard and Alexandre Astruc of the celebrated French short story master, featuring Godard’s first fiction film, Une femme coquette and Masculin féminin. Gamera the Brave closes the Barbican’s All Kaiju Attack: Earth SOS! season, featuring an introduction by Yuriko Hamaguchi. New Women is in NFT3, introduced by Milk Tea Films’ Cynthia Gu. Sands Films Cinema Club screens Fellini’s Ginger & Fred.
Wednesday, Mario Camerini’s “city girl” film, What Scoundrels Men Are! screens in NFT2, introduced by Laura Mulvey. Kennington Bioscope brings Mèliès Presents Mèliès to The Cinema Museum. Curated by Invisible Women, Stronger Than Love: ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama! screens Victim of Sin, Emilio Fernàndez’s “dizzying” melodrama at the Rio. Jellied Reels has Coppola’s The Cotton Club at The Castle Cinema.
Thursday, Afterimage, Afterlife, a programme of Mexican experimental short films “that reflect on the form of absence in the face of violent histories,” lands at Barking’s A House for Artists, featuring works by Mauricio Sánchez Arias, Annalisa D. Quagliata and Elena Pardo, curated by researcher Lola Lemke. Women and Cocaine return to The Cinema Museum with 42nd Street, Julian Marsh’s “dazzling backstage musical”. Xala, Ousmane Sembène’s adaptation of his own novel, is in NFT3. Root and Branch, a programme of shorts probing “the material entanglements that shape our encounters with, and habitation of, seemingly natural landscapes” screens at Close-Up followed by a Q&A chaired by Muriel Tinel-Temple.
Friday, Category H’s late-night screenings at the Rio return with Transportation Horror, a festive programme celebrating the horrors found in flying/riding/driving home for Christmas, featuring Ken Camp’s Highway Hypnosis, the irreverent Rutger Hauer-starring Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal and short Man on a Train. Finch Community Cinema hosts What Happened to Extrospection, a shorts programme curated by Kate Peddicord that explores “the complex, the ambiguous, the unsaid,” featuring works by Grace Muawad, Daisy Smith and Husam Ibrahim. Cinema Tehran is at the ICA with Dead End, Parviz Sayyad’s “rarely seen and long-banned masterpiece,” followed in Cinema 1 by VHS Late Tapes Takeover: LCVA presents POUT, a screening of London’s groundbreaking queer video magazine, first launched in 1992, featuring a post-screening chat between POUT director, Mark Harriott and other members of the POUT collective. The BFI’s Too Much: Melodrama on Film season continues with La otra, a “high-octane melodrama of mistaken identity, criminal indulgence and moral quagmire, introduced by Camilla Baier. Sherlock Shorts, a compendium of three newly restored silent-era adaptations of Conan Doyle’s enduring creation is at the Institut Français. Black in Season Film Club brings Brown Sugar to Rich Mix.
Saturday, a busy day at the ICA: Cinema Tehran presents Downpour, which is followed by Midnight Clear, Keith Gordon’s adaptation of William Wharton, hosted by Lost Reels and featuring an online Q&A with the director, before Diane Keaton and Heaven, an evening celebrating the late actress, featuring a lecture on her work and a screening of her directorial debut Heaven. The Rio’s Feminist Film Group presents the UK premiere of a new restoration of Female Perversions, Susan Streitfeld’s “provocative and sensuous'“ film debut. Bethlehem Cultural Festival offers a programme of Palestine shorts — Echoes of Tomorrow — at The Garden Cinema. The BFI hosts the UK premiere of a new 4K restoration of Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer in NFT2. At The Nickel, there’s a festive triple bill of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, The Silent Partner and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel.
Sunday, Kinoema presents Gallivant: The Art of Wandering and Belonging, a programme of works by Andrew Kötting, followed by a Q&A with Kötting himself at The Garden Cinema. Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park screens at the ICA, before Sine Screen’s screening of Lost + What Rules the Invisible, a double bill of portraits of Hong Kong in the 20th century. So Watt Special: Derek Bailey - New Sights, Old Sounds screens at the Barbican. Public Housing, Frederick Wiseman’s portrait of Chicago’s Ida B. Wells project is in Bertha Dochouse; Central Park is in NFT2.
Until next time