Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 244: Wed Sep 2

Sambizanga (Maldoror, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This film, which also screens on September 19th, is part of the Sarah Maldoror season at BFI Southbnak. You can find all the details here.

Sight & Sound review:
This is the first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another, confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems.” Yet Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country, who takes off to find her husband.”
Sukhdev Sandhu

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 243: Tue Sep 1

That Most Important Thing: Love (Zulawski, 1975): Garden Cinema, 6pm

This is part of the Andrzej Zulawski season at the Garden Cinema. This film is also being shown on September 16th and October 13th. The screening on the September 1st will be introduced by Garden Cinema team member, writer, and filmmaker Sarah Grice.

Chicago Reader review:
Polish-born director Andrzej Żuławski was a master at depicting worlds divorced from traditional moral order, whether the Nazi-occupied Poland of The Third Part of the Night (1971), the supernatural Berlin of Possession (1981), the strange planet of On the Silver Globe (1988), or the sweetly absurd universe of his final film, Cosmos (2015). Few filmmakers have rendered so palpably the experience of losing one’s grip on reality, and with the 1975 French drama L’Important C’Est D’Aimer, Żuławski marries this lifelong subject to a romantic sensibility unlike anything else in his body of work. The title can be translated as “the important thing is to love,” and Żuławski presents love as an all-consuming force, similar to madness or addiction. The film is deliberately overstylized—with outsize performances, lush music (by Georges Delerue), and delirious camera movements—yet the grandeur reflects the intensity of the characters’ experience. Żuławski considers a relationship between two lost souls. Servais (Fabio Testi) is a former war photographer now shooting pornography and working for tabloid magazines; Nadine (Romy Schneider) is a onetime starlet now slumming in sexploitation films. Servais falls for Nadine after taking her picture on a movie set and, to prove his devotion, borrows money from the gangster who finances his porno shoots to produce an avant-garde staging of Richard III that will star Nadine and, she hopes, jump-start her career. During the production, Servais gets closer to the actress but keeps his beneficence a secret; he also gets to know her husband, a mentally unbalanced cinephile (pop singer Jacques Dutronc in one of his first serious roles) whom Nadine pities more than she loves. The growing attraction between Servais and Nadine comes to destroy all three characters, who regret how they’ve failed to live up to their ideals. They try to reclaim their dignity, but only too late, after the stage production flops and Servais is hunted down by the gangster. Żuławski boldly mixes sensationalist elements with high art, defamiliarizing all of them. Scenes of Shakespeare follow S-M porno shoots; protestations of romantic yearning come between depictions of graphic violence. The director connects these disparate pieces with a uniform emotional potency; no matter what takes place onscreen, the characters respond with deep, sometimes terrifying feeling. Also shining through L’Important C’Est D’Aimer is a genuine sense that love enables us to transcend the most degrading experiences. Thanks in part to towering performances from Testi and Schneider, the film makes one believe that the characters’ love is a matter of life and death. 
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 242: Mon Aug 31

Edvard Munch (Watkins, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 2.30pm

This film, which also screens on August 16th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Hailed by Ingmar Bergman as ‘a work of genius’, Watkins’ film fragments the difficult formative years of the Norwegian painter’s life into a vivid, intensely subjective exploration of memory, illness, sexuality and artistic creation. Blending interviews, direct address, documentary techniques and impressionistic montage, the film evokes both the emotional turbulence of Munch’s work and the social and emotional conditions that shaped it.
James Bell

Time Out review:
Peter Watkins' biography of the formative years of the pioneer Expressionist easily vindicates its running time. As Munch moves through his youth, quiet and alienated, we realise that he too was eluded by any lasting intimacy: a long, abortive affair with an older woman joins the ubiquitous ghosts of a childhood scarred by sickness and death. In the end it's the paintings which do Munch's talking for him, both directly and through the prefigurations and echoes in the film's set pieces, a fuzzed, mutely anguished procession of half-profiles and silently helpless groups with numb, naked eyes. It's a remarkable film.
Giovanni Dadomo

Here (and above) is a clip from the film. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 241: Sun Aug 30

La Commune (Watkins, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 12pm

This film is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Watkins’ monumental account of the 1871 Paris Commune stages revolutionary history as if covered by live television, with rival broadcasts interviewing workers, soldiers and citizens. Shot in a disused warehouse and developed collaboratively with its non-professional cast, the film reveals uncomfortable connections between the suppression of the Commune and contemporary inequalities. Hailed as the culmination of Watkins’ life’s work, it is an unmissable work that deserves to be seen on the big screen.
James Bell

Time Out review:
What looks likely to be the final film from the director of ‘The War Game’ returns in style to Peter Watkins’ first feature, the provocative and committed ‘Culloden’. He adopts a similar framing device – the television presentation of a historical event – to explore the rise and fall of the 1871 Paris Commune. Around 200 citizens from the relevant districts reconstruct the events in a film that rigorously interrogates media authority, political power and personal responsibility. Fluidly shot in crisp monochrome, it builds a remarkable sense of popular participation (reflected in its communal making) in a seminal historical moment and deals head on with both how one makes a revolution actually work and similarly how it is betrayed by hierarchical interests.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 240: Sat Aug 29

The Oberwald Mystery (Antonioni, 1980): BFI Soutbank, NFT2, 6pm

This screening also shows on August 14th and is part of the Monica Vitti season at BFI Southbank.

Chicago Reader review:
This is an experimental film in the original rather than fashionable sense of that term—a 1980 adaptation by Michelangelo Antonioni of Jean Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads that reunites the filmmaker with Monica Vitti in the starring role as a widowed queen who falls in love with an anarchist poet sent to assassinate her. What makes this experimental is neither the play nor the performances, but the fact that Antonioni shot it in color video (later transferred to 35-millimeter), regarding the medium not as “television” but as a new kind of cinematography, and associating each character with a different color as part of his visual exploration. The choice of the Cocteau play seems more arbitrary than inevitable, which raises the form-versus-content issue even more than in most Antonioni features. The results are singular, to say the least.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 239: Fri Aug 28

Evening Land (Watkins, 1977): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This film, which also screens on August 15th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
Prophetic in its depiction of surveillance culture and the erosion of civil liberties, Watkins’ drama constructs a portrait of Denmark’s ‘model society’ in crisis during a NATO summit that is overshadowed by strikes in a Copenhagen shipyard, terrorism and mounting social unrest. Blending staged drama with the texture and immediacy of television reportage, the film follows the state’s increasingly authoritarian response to dissent.
James Bell

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 238: Thu Aug 27

The Ceremony (Oshima, 1971): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This film, which is also screened on August 29th, is part of the Nagisa Oshima season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the full details here. 

Time Out review:
A thinly disguised commentary on Japan's post-war history, using ceremonial family gatherings (mainly weddings and funerals) as a key to the changes in Japanese society: individual characters represent specific political factions, just as events in the narrative mirror the twists and turns in the country's domestic and foreign policies. However dense the allegory, though, Oshima keeps it very accessible to his audience by stressing individuals' feelings as much as ceremonies; their dreams, aspirations, frustrations and agonies are all too familiar. A significant political film for the time.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is an extract.