Coming up in June 2018 at BFI Southbank

Throughout June the programme at BFI Southbank will be dedicated to championing work by and about women. It will include major seasons dedicated to the inimitable Agnès Varda and the pioneering actor, director and producer Ida Lupino, who took on the male-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s to set up her own production company and become one of the sole female directors of the age.

Our new Close Up series will this month screen all the work of one of the most important filmmakers working today, Ava Duvernay, who we hope to welcome to discuss her work via Skype, while audiences will also be able to discover pioneering women animators as part of the BFI’s year-long Animation 2018 programme.

At the heart of the programme will be a day-long venue-wide event exploring the theme of women and power; the Woman with a Movie Camera Summit will honour the courageous trailblazers of the past, explore the power and pitfalls of grassroots feminist cinephile activism, champion new voices in criticism and programming, explore movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and, above all, celebrate the women who’ve not allowed themselves to be victimised or excluded from the conversation. The summit will take place on Saturday 16 June, and the line-up of discussions, events and screenings, which will include a special edition of The Guilty Feminist podcast and a screening of Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), will be announced in full soon.

This celebration of women ties in with the UK Parliament’s national Vote100 campaign as well as Processions, a celebratory mass participation artwork, which will see women and girls across the country march wearing the colours of the suffrage movement on Sunday 10 June.

Also in June, we’ll mark the 70th anniversary of Windrush, with a programme celebrating Windrush Women; this will include Testaments, an event that will bring together five generations of black women filmmakers in a day of intimate conversations. Also celebrating 70 years in 2018 is the NHS, and this landmark moment will be marked with a screening of a collection of rare archive films (which will also be made available on BFI Player).

“One hundred years ago British women marched to the voting booths for the first time,” says Gaylene Gould, BFI Head of Cinema and Events. “One hundred years later, Frances McDormand brandished a little gold man and instructed the women at the Oscars ceremony to stand up. A continuum of action has brought about seismic change and, just like those women and men a century ago, we are witnessing a shift. This month, in honour of the Vote 100 campaign, we pay tribute to the women who transcended their worlds to expand ours, and present a programme bursting with female stories.”

Elsewhere in the June programme, the Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival will return with an exciting programme of screenings, Q&As and discussions, and Refugee Week will celebrate the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees from 18-24 June. We will also welcome the award-winning Italian director Marco Bellocchio for a rare UK appearance. Bellocchio will be in conversation on Saturday 23 June, ahead of a month-long retrospective dedicated to his work throughout July.

Previews this month will include the hotly anticipated Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird, 2018) followed by a Q&A with the director, and a TV preview of Women’s Monologues (working title) (BBC Four, 2018), a film of monologues curated by Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, and performed by a variety of well-known female stars.

Another highlight of the programme in June will be an extended run of the 25th anniversary re-release of Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or winning The Piano (1993) starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill and Anna Paquin, which is back in selected cinemas UK-wide on Friday 15 June.