April 2026 programme announced: Boxing, Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, trash cinema, and more

The programme for BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX from 30 March to 30 April 2026 begins with The Cinematic Life of Boxing, a season of films that capture the essence of a sport that has been as influential on generations of athletes and fans as it has on cinema itself. From screenings of Academy Award Best Picture winners Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) and Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), to Best Documentary winner When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1996), Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), plus 35mm screenings of Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947), The Hurricane (Norman Jewison, 1999), Ali (Michael Mann, 2001) and The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010).

Full details of The Cinematic Life of Boxing.

Meanwhile, screening from prints and new restorations, Finding Your Way: The Films of Peter Weir celebrates the timeless work of one of cinema’s most humane auteurs. Wildly different in scale and genre, the films of Peter Weir are united by more than immaculate craftsmanship. If many are beloved classics, it is because his cinema is attuned to the feelings of characters reckoning with what we all must eventually face: the unknown. Whether warring at sea, encountering unfamiliar cultures, or simply waking to the power of poetry for the first time, Weir’s protagonists are spurred to action by overwhelming emotions. 

Born in Sydney in 1944, Weir spearheaded the Australian New Wave before thriving in Hollywood, reconciling commercial demands with a bold arthouse sensibility. Profoundly moving yet never sentimental, his films reach a transcendent beauty precisely because they grapple with the darker sides of experience. Events in the season will include a discussion about Weir as an Australian director with season curator Elena Lazic, academic Dr Stephen Morgan and film critic Tim Robey on 9 April following a screening of The Plumber (1979). 

Further films playing throughout April will include a new 35mm print of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), made by the BFI with funding from the National Lottery, along with 35mm screenings of The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Fearless (1993), plus The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), The Last Wave (1977), Gallipoli (1981), Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989), Green Card (1990), The Truman Show (1998), The Way Back (2010), and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) which will also play on the UK’s largest screen at BFI IMAX on 19 April.

Often received as barbed, playful, nihilistic retorts to the socially and politically rigid, as well as the corrupt, there is much to gain from a date with our season, Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen. Trash films delight in low budgets and so-called ‘bad taste’. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY, made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore, breaking the fourth wall and revelling in audiences’ complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship whilst blurring the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play.

Full details of Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen.

Elsewhere, marking the arrival of his new, stylised documentary Kinaesthesia (2025), which traces the history of dreams in silent cinema, director Gerald Fox has programmed a selection of essential films on this theme. An exploration of the relationship between film and dreams, Kinaesthesia (the sensation of movement) is a lyrical documentary inspired by the film historian Vlada Petrić, which draws on an extensive archive to offer a journey through the history of dreams in early cinema. We preview the film on 17 and 19 April followed by Q&As with Fox. The director will join us again on 19 April to introduce a screening of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) as well as a Silent Dreams Shorts Programme, with other films playing in the month set to include A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926) and The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928).

Film previews at BFI Southbank this month will include the BFI Distribution release Rose of Nevada (2025) on 23 April including a Q&A with director Mark Jenkin and cast (TBC). Jenkin’s latest continues his exploration of Cornish folk myth with the long-missing Rose of Nevada fishing trawler. When it mysteriously returns to its old harbour in a small village, two young men join the new crew hoping to pull themselves out of hardship. But when they return to the harbour, the men realise they have slipped back in time. 

As part of this month’s Big Screen Classics programme, selected by Jenkin, we also welcome Mike Figgis for an In Conversation event on 28 April. One of the filmmaking world’s nonconformists, Figgis employs radical ideas about form and technique in his process. He made Timecode (2000), which we also play on 28 April with an introduction, in four continuous 98-minute takes played together on a screen divided into quarters. Jenkin and Figgis will discuss the film and his rich, eclectic and acclaimed career. 

Meanwhile, we preview BFI Distribution release D Is for Distance (2025) on 2 April followed by a Q&A with directors Emma Matthews, Chris Petit and their son Louis Petit. Louis’ severe epilepsy erased his childhood memories and this personal film, told through family archive footage, explores medical bureaucracy, cinema and the mind, expanding into a meditation on technology, capitalism and resilience.

A screening of The Magic Faraway Tree (2026) on 1 April will include a Q&A with director Ben Gregor and producer Pippa Harris. Enid Blyton’s beloved stories are finally brought blazingly to life in this new British family film which sees the Thompson family reluctantly move to a remote part of the countryside. Things look up when the children discover that they reside near an enchanted wood that is home to a magical tree inhabited by extraordinary characters and a conduit to a series of fantastical worlds. 

On 13 April we preview Surviving Earth (2025) including a Q&A with director Thea Gajić. Based on a true story, Gajić’s feature debut follows a Yugoslav refugee who fled the 1990s conflict and rebuilt his life in Bristol. By day, he works as a drugs counsellor. By night, he leads a Balkan band a finds that music becomes both a refuge from, and a reminder of, the past. 

A preview of Miroirs No. 3 (2025) on 15 April will also be followed by a Q&A with director Christian Petzold. In this haunting, finely wrought drama, Petzold returns to the metaphysical ambiguities that define his most celebrated films. After surviving a car crash that kills her partner, a young pianist forms an unsettling bond with an older woman living in rural isolation. Economical yet emotionally rich, this is a quietly gripping study of loss, doubling and the fragile human connections that make reinvention possible.

A TV preview of Mint (Charlotte Regan, 2026) will include a Q&A with cast and creators (TBC) on 9 April. A Relaxed Screening of My Feral Heart (Jane Gull, 2016) on 30 March will be followed by a 10th anniversary Q&A with director Jane Gull, writer Duncan Paveling and producer James Rumsey. Ten years since its original release, this sensitive and nuanced film about a man who has Downs Syndrome losing his independence after the death of his mother remains a heartfelt plea for understanding and tolerance. 

Our Woman with a Movie Camera strand previews Cotton Queen (Suzannah Mirghani, 2025) on 23 April. Teenage Nafisa enjoys a simple life in a Sudanese cotton-farming village, guided by her grandmother Al-Sit’s stories of resistance against British colonisers. When a young, local businessman returns with a development scheme and samples of genetically engineered cotton, Nafisa is drawn into a struggle over the village’s future. 

Other events include a 25th anniversary screening of Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) on 31 March, plus A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964) on 8 April, introduced by broadcaster and author of the new BFI Film Classics on the film, Samira Ahmed. Shot in a documentary style inspired by the French New Wave, the Beatles’ first feature film captured Britain at a moment of social transformation, with a portrayal of celebrity, camaraderie and media frenzy that still resonates today.

Finally, Mark Kermode Live in 3D returns on 13 April with surprise guests and discussion of upcoming releases, cinematic treasures, industry news and even some guilty pleasures.

Tickets for BFI Southbank screenings and events in April are on sale to BFI Patrons on 9 March, BFI Members on 10 March, and to the general public on 12 March.