As I write this, that’s the International, Book, Fringe Festivals et al just finished for another year, and I don’t know about you, but my feeling is it was marvellous to have them all back as full-scale events. (Why, I even went to see a few shows!) And this year our very own Film Festival (re)joined them in August as well! It felt, in the midst of it, date-wise and every way-wise, like the right place for it to be... 

I’ve read a lot about how audience numbers across the festivals have been quite considerably down on pre-pandemic times. It comes as little surprise, given that’s the experience of many an arts venue, Filmhouse being no exception. That we would prefer that situation to improve is probably not news to anyone, but in the full understanding that we have a major role to play by putting on film programmes you will find it deeply necessary to engage with, we are putting together such a strong programme in the coming few months I have a feeling you might struggle to resist… 

First things first, September!

Andrew Dominik’s brilliant, long-awaited Blonde, an adaptation of the book of the same name (by Joyce Carol Oates), is a fictionalised take on the life of American actress Marilyn Monroe and is not always an easy watch, but, really, it feels to me like something one just has to see for oneself. MM is not the only celebrity subject of films this month, though the others are resolutely not fictionalised.

Moonage Daydream gives David Bowie the experiential, impressionistic documentary his incredible life as an artist richly deserves; Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song tells the titular poet/singer/songwriter’s life story through the prism of his most famous song; and if, for some, Sidney - the definitive documentary on the life of Sidney Poitier - dips its toe in hagiography, well, who cares. It’s a great doc for a great man. 

See How They Run is a hugely enjoyable, 1950s theatre-land set whodunnit in proper Agatha Christie-style in which a to-die-for cast deliver in spades on a clever and witty script; there’s much fun to be had in watching the young, rich and privileged getting what’s coming to them in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies; and David Cronenberg’s latest, Crimes of the Future, marks a welcome return to the body-horror preoccupations of his past...

(Just for fun, we’ve thrown in a few screenings of some of the films with which he made his name – Videodrome, Dead Ringers and The Fly – and all of which, now I think of it, I first saw at that hallowed seat of cinematic learnings, Filmhouse, as a callow student… well… let’s just say… quite some time ago now.) 

We welcome back activism festival Take One Action!, albeit in a curtailed version this year, and the now-prolific Claire Denis returns with one of her best and most accessible films to date, Both Sides of the Blade, starring the one and only ‘Binoche’. And if it’s foreign language, surrealist ‘arthouse’ classics you’re after (and why wouldn’t you be?), the nice folks at Studiocanal have restored one of Luis Buñuel’s most celebrated and wonderfully-titled films, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. 

See, what I was saying about a strong programme? Come join us, you actually could not be more welcome.