About BFF

The programme of films and events planned around the festival celebrates the culture of the individual countries that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), but also the diversity of regions and social classes, as well as the context of colonial and post-colonial countries. We look at history, analyse the present, discuss and try to define: what is British cinema really?

Although this is only the first edition, we see great potential in this idea, stemming not only from the huge existing body of British film culture, but also from its very interesting development in recent years. We think of the festival as a flagship event in Poznań and one that has great prospects of developing with new contexts, film competitions and new partnerships in the years to come - says Dorota Reksińska of Kino Muza, the programmer and originator of the British Film Festival.

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Britishness is also about numerous pop-cultural contexts. A festival during which we drink tea at 5 p.m., set up a red telephone booth in front of the cinema, solve puzzles with the flair of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, read Jane Austen's prose in our spare time and drive up to the cinema in a red double decker bus, sing songs known from Monty Python or those composed by the Beatles. There will also be famous characters: Paddington Bear, Harry Potter, Jason Bean or James Bond,’ adds Dorota Reksińska.

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So what can you expect from the event's film programme?

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The key points of the event will be two film retrospectives juxtaposing the history and the present of British cinema.

The first edition of the festival will be marked by a retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock's films on the 125th anniversary of the iconic filmmaker's birth. Screenings of films from digitally restored copies will showcase the director's early work made in the UK, and audiences will be delighted by a screening of the silent The Tenant with live music! Emblematic of his later career in the United States, there will be a screening of the famous 1963 ‘Birds’, realised in the form of Pop-Up Cinema - being a special screening in a non-obvious space. This screening will be realised outside the cinema, surrounded by candlelight and set in church architecture. There will be films acclaimed but rarely shown on cinema screens: ‘Psycho’, ‘M for Murder’ or ‘North by Northwest’.

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The second retrospective will be dedicated to Lynne Ramsey, a Scottish director and winner of two BAFTA awards. In addition to iconic films from her oeuvre: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and ‘You Were Never Really Here’, short films will also be shown, as well as lesser-known feature films from the early days of her directorial career.

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‍The First Things First section will present high-profile, pre-release screenings of films that will often be out of regular distribution, making them the first or only screenings in Poland. We already invite you to a screening of “Last Swim”, which delighted audiences and won the Crystal Bear award at Berlinale 2024.

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The Classics section, on the other hand, will present cult and classic films of British cinema. The screenings will be from digitally restored DCP copies, as well as from traditional 16mm and 35mm tape media. One of these will be Danny Boyle's cult film “Trainspotting” shown at a special screening at the club, accompanied by a themed music event.

There will also be a High Season section showcasing some of the most interesting examples of British films that screened in cinemas in the 2023/2024 season, an opportunity to catch up but also to see how many productions have hit cinema screens in the past year.

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The Mind the Gap section will showcase films of typical British social realism cinema - both historically (from the New Wave tradition of 1950s and 1960s Free Cinema and Young Angry Cinema, through to the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s), as well as contemporary examples of the trend's representation. These are films that comment on the past and present political and social situation of people living in the UK, and the Muza Cinema will be showing such films as: “My Beautiful Laundrette”, directed by Stephen Frears in 1985 and starring one of Daniel Day-Lewis' first roles, or Alan Clarke's “Made in Britain”, starring teenage debutante Tim Roth as a violent skinhead.

The name of the section refers to the traditional audio and visual message introduced in 1969 on the London Underground, but at the same time colloquially and metaphorically draws attention to the ‘hole’, the ‘gap’, defining existing social divisions in British everyday life.

The Five o'clock section will showcase heritage cinema, which draws on Britain's landed, aristocratic, imperial and colonial traditions. The films in this strand are costume dramas that recreate the atmosphere and ambience of the past with flair and nostalgia, allowing audiences to touch a bygone era. A highlight of the section will be a screening of Hugh Hudson's iconic, award-winning four, and nominated for seven Oscars, Chariots of Fire, on the 100th anniversary of the events happening in the film.

The section's name, of course, refers to the tradition of tea time - the famous English five o'clock in the afternoon at which the British sit down to tea. Film screenings from this section will start at 5pm evenly.

And once the tea has been sipped - you'll be invited to late-night screenings in the Bloody Hell! dedicated to British B-movies that scare you with their understatement and threaten to make you burst out laughing. The programme will showcase low-budget pictures that are not only badly made, but have gone down in history as prime examples of cinematic monsters, and thanks to a collaboration with the makers of the madcap Octopus Film Festival and VHS HELL, will be screened just from VHS tapes!

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The full festival programme will be announced at the end of October. Tickets for screenings and additional events will also go on sale at that time.