Celluloid celebration: the BFI Film on Film Festival 2025

Two years ago, I was seated towards the back of NFT1, at BFI Southbank in London, about to watch a nitrate Technicolor print of Rouben Mamoulian’s sizzling matador drama Blood and Sand (1941) at BFI Film on Film Festival. After introducing the film, James Bell, senior curator of fiction at BFI National Archive, talked us through the protocols in case of fire, a risk due to the highly flammable film running through the projector. The short answer was that every safety system was in place, but in the remote possibility of the worst happening, we were to evacuate the hall at the exits furthest from the projection booth. As the lights went down, the chap next to me whispered, with the bravado of a man stepping into the arena with a red cloak, “What a way to go!”

It turned out Rita Hayworth was the only one among us to smoulder. But I’ll never forget the glory of that screening, with Mamoulian’s palette of bronzes, pinks and reds gleaming on the screen. June marks the return of the BFI Film on Film Festival, and its second edition offers the opportunity to experience the mechanical magic of projected light: deep, inky blacks, shimmering colours and velvety grain. Plus the occasional scratch, of course: the welcome sign of a print that has a past.

“If it’s an original print, there is an immediate sense that you’re watching something which connects you to the moment of creation in a way that isn’t there with the DCP [digital cinema package],” says Bell, the programme director for Film on Film. He is a strong advocate for the analogue experience. “You know when you’re watching a print that it’s changing as you watch it and it may pick up a blemish in this moment. Because of the ever-so subtle changes as it runs through the gate and hits the light, it is more dynamic, more alive than watching something digital.”

Around 380,000 feet of film will be screened, an impressive statistic; this comprises 38 features, 36 shorts and one TV programme on 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and 70mm prints, five of which are nitrate. Highlights include an original 1977 print of Star Wars, the 1990 pilot of Twin Peaks on 35mm, plus a Q&A with Kyle MacLachlan, and the oldest print ever projected in the UK: a nitrate release print of surrealist silent Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929), which will be presented exactly as Buñuel intended.

Inspiration for the first festival came partly from independent film programming. “We knew that there had been a revival of interest in seeing film on film, alongside efforts made by grassroots collectives such as Badlands, Kennington Bioscope and others,” Bell tells me. “For this festival, we’re working with Lost Reels, who do similar work. BFI Southbank has a strong component of showing movies on film, and films from the BFI National Archive. But I don’t think we anticipated quite how much it would feel like a coming together and a real moment. There was just a fantastic atmosphere. There’s a community that’s gone into putting the festival on and it’s nurturing a community of audiences.”

The collaboration with programming organisation Lost Reels is 1969’s Last Summer, directed by Frank Perry (perhaps best known for 1968’s The Swimmer), an edgy teenage drama set on Fire Island. “It’s extremely rare and not on any home video format. We have two prints and assessed both,” says Bell. “They were found to have wear and tear, colour fading and obvious signs of having lived their life, but such is the rarity of the title, I thought, if this is the only way to see something, sometimes you have to take those compromises. In itself it tells a story about the life of that film. The print we’re going with is on Agfa stock and, unusually, where most prints fade with magenta bias, this one has faded with a slightly blue cast.”

Sometimes you have to look past the damage, and sometimes it’s part of the story. “Seeing this offers a chance for people to say, ‘This tells me something about how film fades in different ways.’ It’s really interesting to see what the visual qualities of this image will be.”

As demonstrated by the enthusiasm for 70mm screenings of films such as Oppenheimer (2023) and The Brutalist (2024), the film-on-film bug is catching. “We’re finding that screening film prints draws a younger audience,” says Bell. “Nostalgia is one thing, but what we want to say is, actually, that there’s a real material difference in the experience when you see a film print.”

This year’s programme will illustrate that difference. There will be newly minted 35mm prints of I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) and Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983). But the romance of the festival lies largely in its archive material, including, say, two Kubrick films from the director’s own collection. Take I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, 1996), tied up in rights issues but screening in June on a pristine 16mm print. Or Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996). “It came to the archive because Makhmalbaf and his family, all filmmakers, now have refugee status in Britain and feared for the safety of their material in Iran,” says Bell. “So it was brilliant to be able to, on the one hand, preserve it and bring it into the collection, but also show these prints.”

The festival aims to inspire more than just analogue spectatorship. “We wanted to point to some of the archival roles and careers people can have,” says Bell. “This festival takes a whole human chain, from the people who oversee the archive, to retrieving, to checking those prints, preparing them for screening, the drivers who bring them to the South Bank, the projectionists who carefully project them, and the curators who choose them in the first place.

“It’s why we like to thank the projectionists in particular, by name, before each screening. We want to expose that hidden wiring.”

BFI Film on Film’s opening night title is a contradiction in terms, a very rare version of a global blockbuster: an original, unfaded Technicolor print of the original Star Wars movie from 1977. “I was curious, first of all, to see if we had the materials,” says Bell. “We did a thorough inspection and it was revealed that we have a couple of copies and, in fact, it was of one of the original British release prints. Whereas elsewhere in the world the film was typically released on Eastmancolor prints, in Britain it was released on an IB Technicolor dye print. The Rome and Los Angeles Technicolor labs had closed in the mid-70s, but the London one just about remained open. One of the very last films to be printed that way was Star Wars.” 

What’s special about dye transfer Technicolor prints is that they don’t fade like Eastmancolor. “It has some marks, it bears its life in terms of scratches and other wear, but in terms of the colour, it’s glorious, it’s unfaded,” says Bell. “They’re very coveted, prized objects.”

Screening the UK release print also emphasises the homegrown connections of a film that was shot at Elstree and features many British actors, not least Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. “It’s a uniquely British BFI National Archive story as well,” says Bell. The archive preserves the original continuity scripts, as marked up by continuity supervisor Ann Skinner during the making of the film, which will be on display during the festival, alongside on-set Polaroids.

“Star Wars is such a culture-shaking, transforming phenomenon, but when you see it afresh and see it as it was screened 48 years ago, it’s this incredibly bold, quirky, slightly fantastical, mad project. It has a different charm when you see it and you imagine what it would have felt like to see that coming out of nowhere.” Even the name of the film is different. The first prints say Star Wars, not Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

“You’re seeing an object before there was all that accumulated mythos. It is exactly as experienced in 1977.”

Recommendations from the Sight and Sound team on what to see at the BFI’s Film on Film Festival

Friday 13 June, 18:10, NFT2 

The very literal title of Mary Harron’s debut feature feels like it could have been a name for one of his artworks, given its deadpan matter-of-factness. But I Shot Andy Warhol was actually taken from Valerie Solanas’s statement to the police after her attempted assassination of the artist in 1968. It’s a perfect fit for Harron’s 1996 film, which tells the true story without reverence or judgement. It treats Solanas’s notorious S.C.U.M Manifesto with seriousness, but doesn’t underplay her mental disintegration and the danger Solanas posed to those around her. Played with scrappy hostility by Lili Taylor, Solanas hustles to survive, looking like a strung-out Artful Dodger who chances her way into the shining Factory. As the film is unavailable on DVD or streaming, this is a rare chance to see it. 

– Katie McCabe, reviews editor

Saturday 14 June, 20:50, NFT2 

Hollywood’s a hustle. From Sunset Boulevard (1950) to Barry (2018-23), the one thing Tinseltown delights in more than the story of itself is its own naughtiness. Get Shorty (1995) – in which John Travolta, fresh from Pulp Fiction the previous year, swung from hitman to loan shark – is Barry Sonnenfeld’s take on the grubby business of film. Travolta plays Chili Palmer, a Miami gangster new to town and unafraid to use his fists to get a deal done. The sterling supporting cast includes Delroy Lindo, Rene Russo, Danny DeVito and the late Gene Hackman as the threadbare B-movie director Harry Zimm.

– Henry Barnes, BFI digital editor

Thursday 12 June, 18:00, NFT2

Ten years ago I commissioned a cover feature of Sight and Sound (‘The Female Gaze’, October 2015) that asked critics and curators to each nominate a film by a female director they thought was wrongly forgotten. Observer critic Philip French wrote back with ten suggestions and we published his thoughts on the least known – Laila Mikkelsen’s Little Ida (1981). While many other films from that issue have been treated to screenings, restorations or rereleases, this is the first chance to watch Mikkelsen’s exploration of the last year of the German occupation of Norway as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl – and on an original 35mm print, no less. In French’s words, it is “a film of subtle, but often brutal observation. There is scarcely a touch of sentimentality in a movie that is one of the best, least judgemental treatments of fraternisation with the enemy during WWII and the terrible revenge taken by those involved at the end of hostilities.” French also told me the rights had been acquired by Andrew Lloyd Webber to make a stage musical, which never materialised. 

– Isabel Stevens, managing editor

Thursday 12 June, 20:40, NFT3 

Dušan Makavejev ’s 1971 docufictional sex odyssey spans subjects, genres, tones and even sides of the Iron Curtain (half was shot in the US, the other half in Makavejev’s native Yugoslavia). Supposedly focused on the psychosexual theories of the controversial Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, it spins out from there to feature Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis, murderous figure skaters and more. A clue as to what you’re getting yourself into comes in the film’s opening credits: ‘Erotoscope courtesy of United States of Erotica’. Curator William Fowler reports that the 35mm print, which otherwise looks excellent, has “a slight yellow hue and occasional clicks on the soundtrack”. The scuzzier the better! 

– Thomas Flew, editorial assistant

Sunday 15 June, 12:00, BFI Blue Room 

This slot in the Families section offers the opportunity for a young audience to discover a projectionist at work within the auditorium as they thread up a selection of six animated and live-action shorts. Attendees will get to see the projectionist operating that rarely seen mechanism and hear the projector whirring as they screen classics including Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1977), an educational documentary that incrementally zooms out from a picnic into the cosmos, then plummets back down to the cellular level of the unsuspecting picnicker. 

– Ryan Swindlehurst, publishing coordinator

Sunday 15 June, 12:15, NFT2 

It was Frank Capra who had the idea for a pioneer story about a wagon master (Robert Taylor) who is hired to bring a caravan of 140 women overland from Missouri to help build a community in 1850s California. In the firm hands of action director William A. Wellman, the long and arduous journey of the 1951 film plays a bit like Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) with mail-order brides instead of cattle – except that this exceptional western gives unusual weight to the grit and individuality of its pioneering dames, and the resilience with which they face up to the perils of life on the trail. 

– Sam Wigley, BFI digital features editor

BFI Film on Film Festival takes place in London at BFI Southbank and BFI Imax from 12 to 15 June.