Long Take: June 2025
BFI Film on Film Festival, Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, and The Nickel lands in Clerkenwell
The centrepiece of Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, Wanda screens on 35mm at BFI Southbank on the 3rd, with an introduction by season curator Elena Gorfinkel.
Welcome to Long Take. Each month we’ll take a look at the best in moving image culture across three sections. Highlights offers a baker’s dozen of the month’s best repertory screenings. White Cube draws attention to exhibitions outside the cinema circuit. And Forum gathers together talks, lectures, events, and anything else that resists easy categorisation.
It’s a less timely companion to Deep Focus, our weekly listings email, but with a broader and looser remit.
Running from the 12th and through the weekend, the BFI Film on Film Festival returns for its second edition this month at BFI Southbank. Some headline attractions are sold out, but there are still tickets available for screenings like Sound and Image 2: The Visual Documentary, a programme of shorts eschewing traditional commentary; The State of the Union: The American Newsreel Collective, a collection of 16mm work by the agitational, Marxist collective; Harvest: 3000 Years, “one of the great African films of the 1970s”; The Grierson Sisters: Today We Live; Yugesh Walia and the Birmingham Film Workshop: African Oasis; and, if you can bear the outer section seating in NFT1, The Killing on a 35mm print from Kubrick’s personal collection.
Also at the BFI this June is Complicit: The Films of Michael Haneke, a retrospective of the Austrian provocateur, and Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, a season curated by KCL’s Elena Gorfinkel that explores the work of a director and actor whose thin filmography betrays a career rich with connections and genealogies that open “a portal onto 1970s American cinema, replete with ‘mad housewives’ and wayward drifters.”
Wanda serves as the spine of the season, screening on 35mm on the 3rd with an extended season intro by Gorfinkel, and again on the 7th introduced by Jo Molyneux. Other highlights include The Feminist Moment: Non-fiction and Experimental Shorts on the 5th, a trio of works that diagnose and illuminate women’s shared social oppressions; Sentimental Educations: Barbara Loden’s Classroom Films on the 9th, a collection of little-screened educational shorts by Loden and contemporary Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey); and an all-day Barbara Loden Symposium on the 7th featuring Gorfinkel, Alice Blackhurst, and Ben Rivers to name a few. Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence is on 35mm on the 22nd and 28th as part of a strand exploring “the Wanda moment.” While we have fingers crossed for a still-unconfirmed screening of Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls on 16mm on the 21st in a strand exploring Loden’s influences.
Marking Pride Month, the Barbican’s Queer 70s opens on the 11th, running until July 16th, presenting films that explore the stories that took to the screen in the decade following the Stonewall Riots. The opening night screening of Barbara Hammer shorts is currently sold out, but screenings of Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return, Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, and Shultz’s Car Wash still have availability.
A weeklong festival highlighting films that explore the darkest sides of humanity, Bleak Week arrives at The Prince Charles Cinema via American Cinematheque on the 15th. Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps, “a labyrinthine post-modern epic about gender” coming in at 4 hours; Mike Leigh’s Bleak Moments, followed by a Q&A with the director; and that Twin Peaks episode, Season 3, Episode 8, are all highlights.
A needed corrective to London’s lack of late-night offerings, Picturehouse Central hosts the fourth edition of The World’s Biggest All Nighter on the 7th, with Animus Magazine’s I Like To Watch marathon the pick of the bunch, featuring Basic Instinct, Body Heat and Jane Campion’s In The Cut.
On the 11th, SAFAR Film Festival, the UK’s largest Arab film opens at the Cine Lumière with Watch Out For Zouzou, one of the highest-grossing Egyptian films of all time. The festival runs at venues across London and the UK until the 28th.
June also marks a pair of comings and goings: Loughborough Junction’s Atlas Cinema winds up on the 22nd, making it a year and change of thoughtful, collaborative screenings that draw attention to a cinema and moving image practice that’s often off the beaten path in London’s repertory ecosystem. Be sure to check out its final timetable available here. Whatever they do next will be worth looking out for.
On a brighter note, The Nickel, a film club presenting the best in shlock and grindhouse cinema, now has its own permanent premises nestled away in Clerkenwell. Opening on the 11th with a sold-out screening of Cecil B. Demented, the venue features a foyer bar and shop selling vinyl, books, screenplays, memorabilia and merch.
Highlights
A Colour Box, a programme of pre-Technicolor science films, travelogues and animations, is at The Barbican on the 8th.
The BFI Southbank’s Barbara Loden season begins in earnest on the 3rd, with Wanda on 35mm, following an extended intro by season curator and academic Elena Gorfinkel in NFT1.
On the 4th, Atlas Cinema and film worker Misha Zakharov present a double bill of Come On, Scumbags and Pearlshower Ceremonial Event, which both focus on the “pockets of trans freedom in contemporary Kazakhstan.”
Another early highlight of the BFI’s Loden season, The Feminist Moment: Non-fiction and Experimental Shorts screens in NFT2 on the 5th — a programme of three films, co-presented by Third World Newsreel, that embody “an emergent collective feminist voice.”
On the 7th, the ICA presents an introduction to the “neglected movement” of Cinema-ye Azad, an underground movement of filmmakers in pre-revolutionary Iran, followed by an online Q&A with researcher and film archivist Hadi Alipanah.
A Colour Box, a programme of early and pre-Technicolor science, travelogue and animation shorts featuring “butterflies, fairies, fireworks, crystals and more,” that make use of tinting, hand-colouring and other experimental systems takes to the Barbican’s Cinema 1 on the 8th.
Violet Hour returns to The Castle Cinema on the 10th for its third instalment, Incantations, presenting a double-bill of Nietzchka Keene’s Björk-starring The Juniper Tree following an aperitif of Pete Rose’s Incantation.
On the 12th, the ICA and Other People’s Films present a “curated supercut” of the programme Dyke TV. A celebration of the “bold, raw, and highly dykey” cable show, Dyke TV: The Early Years features appearances from Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye and Barbara Hammer.
Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg screens from a newly restored Photoplay 35mm print as part of the BFI’s Film on Film Festival on the 13th.
A “droll, visually striking odyssey,” through alcoholism and West Berlin, on the 17th Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return screens at the Barbican’s Cinema 3 as part of their Queer 70s season.
Bleak Moments is at The Prince Charles Cinema on the 20th, as part of its Bleak Week season, followed by a post-film Q&A with director Mike Leigh.
On the 22nd, Deeper Into Movies presents Shortcuts at MOTH Club, a programme curated from artist submissions that highlight “bold new voices and singular visions.”
On the 25th Tod Browning‘s The Unknown, “a twisted masterpiece of lust, deception, and the human body pushed to the brink,” starring Lon Chaney, screens at The Nickel on 16mm.
Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, an affectionate period piece on queer inner-city youth in 70s East London, is at the Barbican on the 26th as part of their Rebel Radio season.
White Cube
Dan Guthrie’s Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure at at Chisenhale Gallery from 6th June to 17th August
Mikhail Karikis: “Songs for the Storm to Come” at The Showroom — 27 June — 16 August 2025
Forming Karikis’ latest work investigating climate change, its psychological impacts and the sonic memory of nature, Songs for the Storm to Come is a sound and video installation focusing on collective and individual responses to impending climatic transformations, while searching for ways to activate our trust in the possible, and to imagine hopeful shared futures. Engaging with the urgency of climate change, the work proposes listening and communal sound-making as strategies to cultivate empathy, foster climate care and prepare us for what is to come. While voicing an acoustics of resistance, the work declares that change is in our hands.
Various: “London Open Live: Film Programme” at Whitechapel Gallery — 4 June — 7 September 2025
Accompanying The London Open Live, a free hour-long programme of contemporary artists’ films explores the diverse and evolving landscape of performance today. Showcasing works from 2022-2025, the selection features seven artists working at the intersection of performance and moving image. The programme weaves together contemporary and poetic themes from the impact of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies on human experience, to looking at neurodivergent experiences and the broader consequences of consumerism. In addition, the programme showcases interdisciplinary and collaborative methods within performance and how mundane visual elements within our everyday environment shape our behaviour.
Dan Guthrie: “Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure” at Chisenhale Gallery — 6 June — 17 August 2025
Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure is a major new commission by artist Dan Guthrie. Working primarily with moving image, Guthrie’s practice explores representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness. By deliberately experimenting with form and language, Guthrie probes the limits of visual representation – questioning not only what is shown, but what remains unseen or unsayable on screen. This exploration encompasses the politics of visibility itself, asking how race, memory, and subjectivity are shaped by the act of looking.
Forum
Viral Video: AIDS, art and activism 1983-1994, a programme of screenings, historical material and conversations is at LUX Waterlow Park on the 14th.
On the 7th at BFI Southbank, the Barbara Loden Symposium takes over NFT3 for a day of “talks, presentations and conversations about the legacies of Wanda, and the career and ongoing impact of Barbara Loden as a director, actor and writer,” featuring Elena Gorfinkel, Alice Blackhurst, Ben Rivers, novelist Joni Murphy, Ross Lipman, alongside a screening of Loden’s Classroom films.
LUX Waterlow Park hosts Viral Video: AIDS, art and activism 1983-1994 on the 14th, a programme of screenings, historical material and conversation exploring the “coming together” of video art and community video, co-presented by Conal McStravick, Ed Webb-Ingall and Mark Harriott.
The ICA welcomes visual artists Arthur Jafa and Mark Leckey in conversation on the 26th to mark the opening of Hardcore / Love at Croydon’s Conditions gallery.
Until next time.
JR