Inside the Archive #42: reporting from Locarno Film Festival

The Locarno Film Festival has been running since 1947 and, in 1954, became the first international festival to run a retrospective alongside its annual review of new cinema, and the festival’s retrospectives have over the years been celebrated for how extensive and well-programmed they are. The 2025 retrospective, programmed by Iran-born, London-based film programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht, was no exception. Called Great Expectations, it focused on British cinema 1946-1960, teasing out the ways it addressed the post-war mood and pointed towards the future. The programme was developed in collaboration with the BFI National Archive – led by us, BFI National Archive curators James Bell and Jo Botting – and prints from the BFI National Archive formed a significant resource for the programme. 

To this end, a number of the films featured children, a common trope for representing societal regeneration, starting with the documentary A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1946) which looked at the first few months of a baby born towards the end of World War II. Ehsan’s brilliant conceit for the programme was to include a number of films through which audiences could imagine the fate of the ‘Timothy’ character over those tumultuous postwar years, through films such as Charles Crichton’s Hunted (1952), starring Dirk Bogarde, all the way up to the final film in the programme Michael Powell’s scandalous Peeping Tom (1960). 

Ehsan’s desire to focus on the experience of British people in those postwar years meant that he imposed a firm programming criteria: all the films had to be set in Britain, and in that present moment. So, period dramas were out, as were such classics as The Third Man (1949), given its setting in Vienna. And while the programme included a great number of comedies and noir-like thrillers, genres such as science fiction and horror were also excluded. 

The retrospective featured over 40 titles shown over the two weeks of the festival, and was based at the capacious Grand Rex Cinema near the main square. The screenings were very well attended, though with temperatures in the mid-30s in the small town on the shores of Lake Maggiore, the Rex cinema’s excellent air-conditioning may have been part of the draw. There was an enthusiastic reception for Ealing Studios films such as Passport to Pimlico (1949) and Mandy (1952), along with more obscure titles like J. B. Priestley-scripted comedy Last Holiday (1950) and ‘murderous female’ dramas Daughter of Darkness (1948) and This Was a Woman (1948).

Both of us – James and Jo – along with other non-BFI critics and curators, were in attendance to introduce the films and give much-needed context to some of the more obscure aspects of British culture of the 1940s and 50s. These seemed to go down well and Jo will be introducing a small programme taken from the retrospective at the cinematheque in Bern later this year. A special guest attendee towards the end of the festival was the script continuity supervisor Angela Allen, who among her innumerable credits worked on The Third Man and many films with John Huston. She was in Locarno to introduce Launder and Gilliatt’s uproariously funny boarding-school-set comedy The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), and was interviewed on stage by Ehsan ahead of the screening (which proved a hit, the international audiences in hysterics at the antics of the magnificent Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford). 

One of Ehsan’s key arguments for the programme was that, while these postwar years in British cinema may be relatively well-known and celebrated here in Britain, for many international filmgoers British cinema of this period remains a largely unexplored country. The great response to the programme in Locarno proved that there is real enthusiasm out there for British cinema, and we the BFI plan to take the programme to other countries over the next year or so. Audiences in London will have a chance to see a selection of titles from the programme next May at BFI Southbank so watch this space!

– James Bell, Senior Curator of Fiction and Josephine Botting, Curator

2025 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway, with events being held across the country to mark the occasion. 

On 2 September, the BFI joined the festivities with a special event at BFI Southbank. Featuring a unique programme of the UK’s greatest railway films (presented and selected by BFI Archive Curator Steven Foxon and historian Tim Dunn), the event celebrated the enduring bond between ‘reels and rails’. 

From the first moving-picture record of a British train and the iconic, lyrical Night Mail (1936) to footage of the InterCity 125, the programme (enjoyed by a full house!) showcased the rich variety of train-related material held within the BFI National Archive’s collections – much of which can be sampled on BFI Player.

Our Railway 200 celebrations continue with a special series of articles being published on the BFI’s website. You can read the first instalment here.

- Alex Prideaux, Marketing & Events Manager (Our Screen Heritage)

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.