The long weekend for cinephiles: highlights from Cinema Rediscovered 2025

Sitting down to write about Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered has reminded me that I have been attending it for the better part of 10 years. Run with dedication and enthusiasm by Watershed’s Mark Cosgrove and programmer Maddy Probst – with an army of Watershed staff, external curators from the Bristol Black Film Club, Club des Femmes and beyond – it has become one of the best regional festivals in Britain. And more than that, it is perhaps the finest repertory festival in the UK, taking its cues from Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna as a place to learn about forgotten world cinema gems in a warm and convivial environment.

When I was 26, I watched Bill Morrison’s hauntingly beautiful documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) here – destined to become an all-time favourite. Not long after, I watched Lizzie Borden’s hybrid-genre feminist classic Born in Flames (1983) for the first time. Last year, I was honoured to present the opening keynote speech. And so my relationship with the festival and its programmers is, admittedly, coloured by our shared personal and professional cinephilia over the years. But I never fail to be surprised or impressed by something that’s screening at Cinema Rediscovered over their long weekend, and that remained true this year. 

The fest’s biggest theme for the 2025 edition was 80s Britain, a time of austerity, yuppiedom, racial strife, and a cinematic response to Thatcherism, perhaps paralleling the conservatism of our own discomfiting times. The opening film was a restoration of lesser-appreciated David Bowie vehicle Absolute Beginners (1986), but across the weekend we also saw the likes of Alan Clarke’s still-hilarious Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) and Peter Greenaway’s perverse zoological nightmare A Zed & Two Noughts ( 1985). And a new essay film – Alexander Horwath’s epic, Thom Andersen-esque Henry Fonda for President – was a clever and fascinating unpicking of American political history through the lens of Golden Age Hollywood’s great patrician liberal, while also taking a pointed tack on current events.

Still, most of what I saw and loved best did not fit neatly into any prescribed category or of-the-moment topicality. A restoration of the long difficult-to-see and maligned 1972 Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays was among my favourites, screened along with Frank Perry’s rather better-loved Burt Lancaster flick The Swimmer (1968). Laconic and perhaps too elliptical for its own good, Play It as It Lays is ripe for Gen Z rediscovery (someone on Letterboxd described it as having “Lana Del Rey vibez”), but, more importantly, it is a courageously dyspeptic film amid the glamour of Quaalude-coated, Corvette-driving, radical-chic-era LA. The dissociative femininity, the failures of polyamory, and the images of self-harm all feel both extremely 1972 and extremely in dialogue with today.

Another film with a remarkable female lead was the 1966 crime film Irezumi (or ‘The Tattoo’), screening as part of a strand of post-war Japanese films by underappreciated Daiei Studios filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura, and focusing on his work with luminous leading lady Ayako Wakao. Here, in painterly colour and with a gorgeous compositional eye for layering image within the frame, Masumura crafts a story both audacious and satisfying: a beautiful young woman, Otsuya, is forced into sex work, and then uses her geishadom to manipulate and destroy the men around her in revenge, wearing some pretty gorgeous and vividly patterned kimonos in the process. Otsuya is devious and clever, high on the excitement as much as she is vengeance; she’s a deliciously morally-murky anti-heroine. 

Another highlight was a minor-key, jazzy 1964 docu-fiction called Belarmino, after its sly, unreliable subject: a Portuguese boxer with a pug nose, plenty of street charm, and very little in the way of trustworthiness. With its arpeggios of jagged edits and grainy black-and-white footage combining both documentary and fictionalised footage, it’s a fascinating, slippery slice of life. Director Fernando Lopes examines the boxer’s grandiosity, his grinding impoverishment and, in so doing, the prospect of ever achieving filmic truth.

The Fall of Otrar (1991), meanwhile, might have been the jewel in the crown of the programme: a rarely-seen film of towering scale and style, it’s an epic 13th-century war story summoning the grandiosity of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) on a miniscule budget. Telling the story of a historical and ill-fated last stand against the ravening hordes of Genghis Khan’s Mongols, the film is beloved by Martin Scorsese and was restored by his Film Foundation with the filmmaker Ardak Amirkulov’s guidance. It feels as though it truly emerges from the mists of time rather than 1991, switching between sepia and colour to bring out textures and moods accordingly, featuring shots teeming with detail and movement in its battle sequences, and some truly horrendous medieval torture sequences.

Later recognised as one of the major gems of the Kazakh New Wave, the film was made by Amirkulov – then a student – over a number of years in the late 1980s and 90s, with frequent pauses in production to raise additional funds. At its centre is a striking performance from fearsome, almost Toshiro Mifune-esque lead actor Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev, playing a warrior and diplomat who tries – with difficulty – to warn of the invasion to come. To paraphrase programmer and archivist Daniel Bird, there to introduce the film on Bristol’s largest screen (The Megascreen): it may well be the most impressive student film ever made.

Several of the aforementioned films will be available to screen across cinemas in the UK – some of which hopefully touring with talent or their curators to further contextualise their importance in cinema history. From Malian pioneer Souleymane Cissé’s gorgeously panoramic Yeelen (1987) to the UK premieres of previously rare silents Song (1928) and Pavement Butterfly (1929), featuring 20s screen goddess Anna May Wong, this fest is a veritable treasure trove of cinematic rarities. And all in one little independent cinema by the canal in Bristol. It’s hard to ask for more.