Full Line-up: Hollywood Blacklist Retrospective at Locarno

 

I have already shared news about Red and Black, a forthcoming programme on the Hollywood Left/leftism and the blacklist/McCarthyism, which will take place at the Locarno Film Festival from 5–15 August. (Previous posts included the accompanying podcast series, which you can still access here.)

Now I am delighted to share the complete programme.

The retrospective features 26 films that will be screened in 35mm (including several photochemical restorations), one 16mm print, and the remainder in excellent DCP presentations. In total, fifty or fifty one titles.

Highlights include very rare films by Losey, Vorhaus and Odets; brand-new restorations of A King in New York and The Hat; newly scanned, rarely seen period newsreels; and the world premieres of two documentaries: Dangerous Citizen: The Life and Times of Abraham Polonsky and La Liste Noire d’Hollywood: Par ceux qui l’ont vécue, about a remarkable 1983 gathering in Los Angeles attended by many of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.

British Postwar Cinema: Great Expectations at BFI Southbank

Turn the Key Softly

Notes written for the monthly programme of BFI Southbank, May 2026. In May and June some of these films are also playing at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, Filmhaus Nürnberg in Nuremberg, and Filmoteca Española in Madrid. – EK

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema

Handpicked highlights from a recent retrospective at Locarno, revealing the humanism, exuberance, and existentialist edge of British classics.

From its very first edition, the 79-year-old Locarno Film Festival showed a genuine interest in British films, culminating in Hunted (1952) winning the festival’s top prize. Last year at the Swiss festival, we revisited that tradition with a retrospective structured around the question of life in Britain as reflected in postwar films set in contemporary times. This handpicked selection from that larger programme showcases precious 35mm prints from the collection of BFI National Archive and traces different shades of popular cinema from a golden period – films grounded in reality yet shaped by distinct generic, authorial, and formal convictions. Be it a comedy or a crime film, the shadow of the war continues to loom over characters’ motives and scars the urban landscapes they inhabit, where life and its meagre joys remain rationed. Including several rare gems, these works chart a nation’s rise from the ashes of conflict and follow its faltering steps toward reconstruction.

British Postwar Cinema: Great Expectations at Filmoteca Española

It Always Rains on Sunday

Notes written for the monthly catalogue of Filmoteca Española on Great Expectations, currently screening in Madrid as part of the May–June 2026 programme. — Ehsan Khoshbakht

1945 was a watershed moment for Britain. To this day, it is debated whether it marked the beginning of greatness or the start of decline. A 45-film retrospective at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival explored that postwar landscape. As Ian Christie, a prominent historian of British cinema, told me, postwar Britain was a place you would rather not be: grim, desolate, broken, grey, and somehow lost, after the wartime spirit of unity had become an old, undesired rag, quickly discarded.

At the same time, Britain—or rather British cinema—was brimming with greatness on screen, a greatness that, beyond a few household names, has remained criminally marginal. The films of this era reflect the victor’s landscape of loss and displacement. They chart a nation’s rise from the ashes of conflict and follow its faltering steps toward reconstruction against the backdrop of the British Empire’s decline.

A conversation with Henry K Miller about the British postwar cinema season at BFI Southbank

The Great Expectations season is underway at BFI Southbank. The Financial Times’ Henry K Miller has penned a fine piece about this smaller selection from a British postwar cinema retrospective of the same name, originally curated for the Locarno Film Festival (August 2025), where the full 45-film programme premiered. He asked me several questions before publishing his piece, and I reproduce my responses here to provide further clarity about the nature of the season and its origins. This was an email exchange.

Great Expectations at the Cinémathèque suisse [in French]

Pool of London

Sélection de films britanniques d'après-guerre (1945-1960), en partenariat avec le Festival du film de Locarno à la Cinémathèque suisse.

Avec une rétrospective titrée Great Expectations, le Locarno Film Festival présente, cette année, 45 films britanniques réalisés entre la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et 1960. Dès sa première édition, le festival avait manifesté un réel intérêt pour le cinéma britannique et avait décerné son prix principal à Hunted (1952) de Charles Crichton. La sélection de Locarno – dont plusieurs titres soigneusement choisis seront projetés à Lausanne – célèbre les années marquantes et l’âge d'or du cinéma britannique.

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960

Retrospective at Locarno Film Festival 2025

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema

1945-1960

Though not quite the “lost continent” it was once called, British cinema still remains under-explored by international audiences. Featuring 45 titles, this retrospective celebrates some of the defining years of British cinema—a “golden age” of sorts— structured around the question of Britishness and life in the British Isles as reflected through its postwar cinema.

Presenting both major classics and some lesser-known, if equally worthy, titles, across a wide range of genres – comedies, melodramas, crime films, and literary adaptations – this selection focuses solely on contemporary films (no period pieces, WWII narratives, or fantastical premises) and pointedly excludes the New Wave and Kitchen Sink movements whose early years overlapped with the period covered here. Although the retrospective includes a handful of documentaries for context, the primary focus remains on narrative films.

​Understanding the Dark Edge: British Postwar Cinema at Locarno – A Conversation

(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.

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema | 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."

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE

Iranian New Wave: 1962–79 at Melbourne International Film Festival

Dead End by Parviz Sayyad

Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution, 1925-1979, a landmark retrospective held last year at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, was an eye-opener that traced a national cinema still largely unknown to a wide international audience. Thanks to the availability of new restorations and rare archival film prints, the majority of which now banned in Iran, an immensely creative period was revisited in splendid detail, revealing the roots of a rich and visionary cinematic tradition. While the New York program featured over five decades of Iranian cinema encompassing the avant-garde and the popular, this selection for the Melbourne International Film Festival, curated by the original team behind the MoMA exhibition, focuses on works associated with Cinema-ye Motafavet, or the Iranian New Wave.

Agony & Ecstasy: Visual Arts on Screen

Picasso and H. G. Clouzot in the studio during the production of  Le mystère Picasso

Agonia ed estasi: le arti sullo schermo
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Cine Lumiere, Cineteca di Bologna, January 2019
A season of films about artists at work and the process of creating art captured by a movie camera. Prelude to Artefiera 2019.

BOOKING
FULL PROGRAMME IN ITALIAN

Leaving the museum, gallery or the stage of performance behind, this selection of films goes a few steps back and captures the joy and angst of the creative process in which artists build, compose, propose or occasionally destroy. These films are both about the places in which art is made and the feelings put into that creation, films filled with visions which, in the words of John Berger, make one gasp – "gasp as one does before a revelation."

The programme is consisted of a prologue, two main parts and an epilogue.

Drifting Shadows: Masterpieces of Finnish Cinema

Antti Alanen and I have put together a programme celebrating Finnish film history. Drifting Shadows -- a title borrowed from a book by Peter von Bagh to whom this programme is dedicated -- features 17 titles, short and feature length, documentary and fiction, to be screened from newly restored DCPs or vintage prints (both 16 and 35mm) at Close-Up Film Centre in London, 18-30 January 2019. A selection of six titles will be screened at Edinburgh's Filmhouse in January and February 2019.

***

Cinema in Finland got a flying start with a visit of the Lumière company in 1896, and in 1907 fiction film production was launched to great success, but for a long time Finnish cinema remained a treasure for domestic consumption only. Before the Kaurismäki phenomenon the best-known Finnish film was Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer, but there is much more to discover. This programme sheds light on one of the most overlooked Nordic national cinemas which is currently enjoying a boom in audience success, production volume, and versatility.