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The Passionate Friends |
Saturday, 22 March 2025
British Postwar Cinema: Five Personal Favourites
Thursday, 13 March 2025
Understanding the Dark Edge: British Postwar Cinema at Locarno – A Conversation
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(c) Locarno International Film Festival |
A conversation with Locarno’s Christopher Small about my new curatorial project for the festival's 2025 retrospective, Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960. A slightly different edit of the conversation can be accessed here on Locarno’s website.
Locarno: Was there a single film that catalysed the idea for this retrospective in your mind?
Ehsan Khoshbakht: A Diary for Timothy (1945) by Humphrey Jennings. It is a remarkable film made during the final stages of World War II, with the knowledge that the war would soon end. The film then asks, 'What next?' It shows a child being born and poses the question: What will happen to this child? How can we make the world a better place for Timothy? I immediately thought of doing a retrospective to explore what happened to that child, following his life and the lives of the people around him.
Monday, 10 March 2025
Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960 | Variety Interview
"August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960.
The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures.
Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the Locarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection."
Sunday, 18 October 2015
Suffragette (Sarah Gavron, 2015)
SUFFRAGETTE
Director: Sarah Gavron; UK, 2015
Reviewed by Kiomars Vejdani
Meant to be one of the prestigious productions of the year, the film is about women's fight for the right to vote in England 1917, as inspired and led by the activist group Suffragetes. The film uses the experience of its protagonist (an ordinary housewife played by Carey Mulligan) to depict the development of the movement. From the condition of women with hard manual work and low wages in a male dominated world to gradual emergence of social awareness and reacting to the injustice of social discrimination, initially peaceful protest but later on defiant acts of sabotage, harsh treatment by the police to suppress the movement, sacrifices of losing job and family, and eventually recognition through one of the members sacrificing her life. Director Sarah Gavron gives a powerful drama based on her own feminist conviction and belief in the rights of women.
Sunday, 11 October 2015
Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015)
SUNSET SONG
Director: Terence Davies; UK/Luxembourg, 2015
Reviewed by Kiomars Vejdani
Terence Davies is on top form with a film reminding us of his early works like Distant Voices, Still Lives. But while his new film is not autobiographical and is based on a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibon set in Scotland of the early 20th century, the familiar elements of romantic nostalgia is present. The film follows the life story of its protagonist from her days as a teenage girl, living in a farm with a loving mother and a tyrant of a father, and after their death becoming a farm owner, wife and mother, deeply in love with her husband until First World War brings her a sorrow that many women faced. A literary third person narration gives a film a poetic touch added to the visual beauty of its images, whether outdoors such as golden corn fields under the sun or indoors as lit by oil lamp or candle. Terence Davies at his most stylish.
Friday, 2 October 2015
High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)
HIGH-RISE
Ben Wheatley; UK, 2015
Reviewed by Kiomars Vejdani
Ben Wheatley's new film has the chaotic world of Fields of England. Although film at its starting point is a satire on Thatcher's era and its values, it stretches far beyond that point into the territory of Apocalypse in the making. An unbalanced world with its standards crumbling symbolised by a tall "high rise" building which despite (or perhaps because of) its elaborately sophisticated architecture, its structure seems off balance and expected to collapse any minute. The metaphor of social distance and class difference has been made only too obvious with lower class in floors below leading a miserable life while upper class on top floor have all the amenities and luxuries at their disposal. Disintegration of social system leads to retrograde movement of civilisation, eventually reaching to a primitive level of existence when people start to eat their own dogs.
Ben Weatley is a master of showing horrors of dehumanisation while in his treatment replacing horror with humour.
Friday, 20 February 2015
British Cinema in Iran: A Brief History
Many histories of contemporary Iran are left unwritten. Many stories about Iranians and their struggles throughout the 20th and 21th centuries, powerful and dramatic ones, are yet to be filmed. Foreign films in Iran, their reception and their impact on film culture is one of them.
I have contributed a chapter to a new book on Iran-UK cultural relations published by the British Council. Didgah: New Perspectives on UK-Iran Relations is a study of affinities shared between the two nations through history, art, and language.
In my chapter, called British Cinema in Iran: A Brief History, I've explored the continuing presence of British films in Iran, whether in form of theatrical screening or popular prime time TV series. It delves into various types of history, such as the history of Iran in 20th century, its film culture and even my personal history and a very special relationship I developed as a teenager with British films on TV.
It is a history which spans the promotional films of the British Council, in the 1940s to TV series such as The Sweeney, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, and Edge of Darkness in 1990s. Sporadically, but often enthusiastically, British cinema and television productions have been highly appreciated in Iran and the UK’s identity has been on display in many and various ways.
I have narrated it, after an introduction, in three parts as following:
- First golden period: the documentary movement
- Second golden period: British art house cinema vs. Norman Wisdom
- After the revolution: Norman (again), Nazis and beyond
The book can be download in its entirety here or viewed online, below.
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Gaslight (1940)
Monday, 17 March 2014
Victim (1961)
Saturday, 15 March 2014
The Witches (1966)
Thursday, 13 March 2014
The Epic of Everest (1924)
Saturday, 25 January 2014
Reports From London Film Festival: Intro
Friday, 24 January 2014
Reports From London Film Festival: Essentials
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Mike Leigh on JMW Turner
Wednesday, 25 September 2013
Edinburgh Video Interviews
Edinburgh © Ehsan Khoshbakht |
Mark Cousins, in Perpetual Motion: Catching up with the road-tripping, time-traveling, soul-searching Mark Cousins as A Story of Children and Film plays Cambridge. The interview, here.