Introduction

This year’s festival promises a wealth of both familiar and rare titles, almost all of them taken from the BFI National Archive, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. The programme spans features, documentaries, artists’ work and much more in between, across formats from 8mm to IMAX. (We’ve even found room for 28mm!) There’s the opportunity to see comparatively recent films unavailable elsewhere, such as Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, 35mm prints newly created by the BFI, such as Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, and a spotlight on black-and-white CinemaScope titles, including Hud, which marks Paul Newman’s centenary.

At the 2023 festival, we offered the first public screenings of nitrate in over a decade. Our commitment continues with five precious nitrate prints, among them an original 1929 print of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, which will be the oldest print ever projected to UK audiences.

Watching such original release prints carries an unmistakable emotional charge, putting us in touching distance of a film’s first release. We know we are looking upon the very same object as its initial audience, and find ourselves wondering when in the intervening decades a particular scratch was picked up – because every print is a unique object, with its own life story.

And the prints in this year’s programme have many stories to tell. There’s Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, screening with his first short, The Day of the Fight; the prints come from the filmmaker’s own personal collection. There’s the 35mm print of the pilot episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – the very same print used for the first UK television broadcast in 1990. And there’s the original, unfaded 1977 dye transfer IB Technicolor print of Star Wars, preserved in the BFI National Archive and ready to transport us to the moment when George Lucas’ vision first set out on its galaxy-conquering journey.

We can’t wait to share them all with you…

James Bell
Senior Curator of Fiction, BFI National Archive
Programme Director, Film on Film Festival

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.