Wuthering Heights filmmaker Emerald Fennell curates complementary ‘Love Stories’ programme for BFI IMAX
The celebration will also include a special event with Emerald Fennell in conversation at BFI Southbank.
A bespoke BFI IMAX programme has been curated by Academy Award and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) to complement the release of her sweeping romantic drama, Wuthering Heights (2026), coming to the UK’s largest screen at BFI IMAX in IMAX with Laser from 13 February.
This limited engagement at BFI IMAX features a tailored programme of four titles selected from a longer list of 13 ’Love Stories’ curated by Fennell especially for the BFI, offering insight into the artist’s inspirations and a taste of what audiences might expect from her highly anticipated imagining of Emily Brontë’s beloved novel. The films, chosen by Fennell to play on the UK’s largest screen each Sunday throughout February, will include Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996), The Handmaiden Director’s Cut (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017).
Writing exclusively for the BFI, Fennell said: “Since its publication 200 years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights’s validity as a love story. It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story nonetheless. While researching it, I rewatched many of my own favourite ‘love stories’, ones that challenged, subverted, even obliterated the conventions of the genre. These are stories which put the love story under duress, which stick a needle into the strawberry trifle, which show love in all its freakish, gory detail.”
We are delighted that Fennell will also join us in person at BFI Southbank on 4 February for the special event, Wuthering Heights: Emerald Fennell in Conversation, when she will discuss her experience of filming her big screen version of Wuthering Heights before it opens at BFI IMAX in IMAX with Laser on 13 February. A bold and original imagining of “one of the greatest love stories of all time”, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion for one another turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love and madness.
The complete list of ‘Love Stories’ curated by Fennell for the BFI, which complement and give context to her adaption of Wuthering Heights, includes Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942), A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946), Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), Peau d’âne (Jacques Demy, 1970), The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996), The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999), Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009), The Handmaiden Director’s Cut (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017).
Tickets for Emerald Fennell Curates ‘Love Stories’ will be on sale on Wednesday 14 January from 12:00 to BFI Members and from 16:00 to the general public, with tickets for BFI IMAX showings of Wuthering Heights in IMAX with Laser on sale on Wednesday 14 January from 12:30. Details of ticket on sale for Wuthering Heights: Emerald Fennell in Conversation at BFI Southbank will be announced soon.