Programme highlights announced for June 2025 at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX: Michael Haneke, The World of Barbara Loden and the return of the Film on Film Festival

The BFI today announce the programme for June 2025, beginning with Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden. Long difficult to see, Barbara Loden’s only directorial feature film Wanda (1970) has recently gained cult status (including entering the top 100 in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, at number 48), emblematic of all the films by women that remain unknown and unseen. 

Taking a deep dive into Loden’s wider film career, creative process and influences, this season explores her work as an actor and director in Hollywood, as well as on its margins. Wanda and Beyond, which runs from 1 – 29 June is programmed by Elena Gorfinkel, whose new BFI Classic on Wanda is published by Bloomsbury on 1 May. Events during the season will include an extended season introduction, presented by Gorfinkel, ahead of a screening of Wanda on 3 June and a Barbara Loden Symposium on 7 June, featuring talks, presentations, and conversation about the career and ongoing impact of Loden as director, actor and writer from guests including restorationist, independent filmmaker and essayist Ross Lipman, whose new book The Archival Impermanence Project launches in June. 

Further titles screening in the season will include Loden’s 16mm education shorts The Frontier Experience (1975) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (1975), films Loden appeared in such as Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960) and Fade In (Alan Smithee, Jud Taylor (uncredited), 1968/1973), cinematic inspirations on Loden including Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950) and Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936) and films that illustrate Loden’s legacies in women’s cinema, such as Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991) and River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1994).

Also taking place in June will be Complicit: The Films of Michael Haneke, a season exploring the extraordinary career, of a filmmaker who has consistently provoked audiences with questions of bourgeois complacency, alienation and disconnect. From his Glaciation Trilogy of The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992), and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) to the shock of Funny Games (1997, which Haneke also remade in 2007) and subsequent Palme d’Or- winning films The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), Haneke has developed a style that articulately fuses social critique with a cinema of transcendent beauty in its precision, purpose and humanity. 

Programmed by the BFI’s Ruby McGuigan and Jelena Milosavljevic, the season will include all the previously mentioned films, as well as extended runs of The Piano Teacher (2001) and Hidden (2004), which are both re-released in UK cinemas this June. Events during the season will include An Introduction to the Worlds of Michael Haneke on 2 June, during which a panel will discuss Haneke’s thematic preoccupations of personal and political dysfunction; an introduction to Haneke’s work for members of the BFI’s 25 & Under scheme on 5 June, including an illustrated overview of his work, and discussion about his style, major themes and dark humour; and a free Collection Focus in the BFI Reuben Library that will dive into the style, influences and contemporaries of Haneke and Austrian cinema.

As previously announced, the second edition of the BFI Film on Film Festival, where every film, without exception, is projected from a print, will also take place in June. Almost every print is drawn from the vast collections of the BFI National Archive, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, with highlights including our Opening Night screening on 12 June of the original, unfaded dye transfer IB Technicolor British release print of Star Wars (1977) and our Closing Night screening on 15 June of a 35mm print of the US pilot episode of David Lynch’s much loved Twin Peaks, the very same print used for the first UK television broadcast in 1990, and presented in person by special guest and star of the series, Kyle MacLachlan. 

Details of the full programme, which spans unique prints loaned from Stanley Kubrick’s own personal collection, a rare nitrate programme, including the oldest print ever projected to UK audiences (the 97-year-old Un Chien Andalou), premieres of five newly create 35mm prints, plus a host of events, discussions and interactive workshops, can be found in a dedicated press release. The BFI Film on Film Festival is made possible thanks to the generous support of the BFI Patrons Consortium, BFI America, the Adam S Rubinson Charitable Fund*, The Charles Skey Charitable Trust, The Polonsky Foundation and The Thompson Family Charitable Trust. (*Donation made to BFI America.)

Events taking place in June will include a Woman With a Movie Camera preview of Lollipop (2024), Daisy-May Hudson’s narrative feature debut, a tender portrait of a mother’s desperate fight to reclaim her children after a prison sentence derails her life. The screening on 5 June will be followed by a Q&A with director Daisy-May Hudson and actors Posy Sterling, Idil Ahmed and TerriAnn Cousins, while the film will also screen on extended run at BFI Southbank when it is released on 13 June.

Focus Hong Kong returns to BFI Southbank from 19-22 June, with a series of UK premieres, including incendiary drama Valley of the Shadow of Death (Jeffrey Lam Sen, Antonio Tam, 2024), the thrilling zombie survival Possession Street (Jack Lai, 2024), the criminally underseen wuxia classic The Black Tavern (Teddy Yip, 1972) and Hong Kong 1941 (Po-Chih Leong, 1984), one of the most acclaimed Hong Kong films of the 1980s, premiering in a stunning 4K restoration, and featuring a breakthrough performance by Chow Yun-Fat. 

Presented in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Counterpoints Arts as part of this year’s Refugee Week festival, will be a screening of Bread and Roses (Sahra Mani, 2023), a searing portrayal of three women fighting to recover their autonomy after the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021. The screening on 20 June will feature an introduction and post-event discussion about the film and its depiction of a struggle for three women’s rights and freedom.

The textures, domestic surrealism and underbelly of the British television sitcom are unpicked and excavated in singular, idiosyncratic fashion in Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s strange new book Code: Damp and a one-off Experimenta film and television cut-up screening mix on 25 June. With references to The Fall, the Situationists, medieval musical instruments, 1970s horror, cuneiform tablets and Holsten Pils, this weird and wonderful event will be hosted by comedian and writer Stewart Lee, who will lead a Q&A with Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. 

Finally, Mark Kermode: Live in 3D returns on 9 June. Joined by surprise guests from across the film industry, Kermode explores, critiques and dissects current and upcoming releases, cinematic treasures, industry news and even some guilty pleasures.