It’s increasingly bittersweet engaging with the Cannes film festival announcements and it has always been a tad so. The increasing bittersweetness comes from the ongoing lack of UK theatrical or streaming release of a number of acclaimed films coming out of the festival, and others, or well-meaning films from acclaimed filmmakers. Films that may be follies or interesting failures or disjointed efforts that nevertheless include interesting cinematic ideas and moments of flourish. I wrote the piece below in summer 2025. It’s a piece I’m proud of in terms of its focus and ideas, even if it makes for depressing reading in places, particularly if you are in the UK and especially if you are in the UK but not in London.

I’m grateful to Dario for the chance to share it here for his intelligent and curious readership, of which I count myself a diligent member. I am also grateful that he as allowed me to update the piece (and include a couple of interim updates) that paint of picture of the landscape discussed in the piece, in the time since.

I like the writing of this piece, even if when we talked about it Dario felt like in the opening section I was having a dig at him. That was never my intention. If anything I was trying to convey that he was more right than I acknowledged or understood, until I came to write the piece. I’m excited to see what emerges from Cannes 2026, from auteurs I’m familiar with and also from filmmakers whose work I don’t yet know.

There is hesitancy though. As the piece explains, I get a lot of my viewing intentions from festival coverage, mostly podcasts, creating a specific list on Letterboxd from that coverage. One of the films discussed in the piece is Angela Schanelec’s Music (2023), and one of the clear highlights for critics at this year’s Berlinale was Schanelec’s latest film, My Wife Cries (2026). She is one of my favourite filmmakers and it breaks my heart a little that her last film, however challenging, has not screened outside odd occasions in London (I live 6 hours away from London) and has yet to emerge on streaming. It’s hard to get excited about a film you may never see, and in the age of supposed abundance of material available online, it’s a cruel masochism sometimes to do so. One likely outcome of all of this Schanelec business is that the success and relative accessibility in comparison to Music is that the latter may pop up on a streaming service, quietly, unheralded, around a release of My Wife Cries.

This is exactly what happened with the film that gives this original and ongoing investigation its title. MUBI picked up The Secret Agent (2025), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest narrative feature, around Cannes last year and it’s just been released on their service. Around it, are several of Mendonça Filho’s short films, and lo, his 2023 documentary about Recife and Cinema and Recife Cinema(s), Pictures of Ghosts. It’s a remarkable and beautiful film. Cinema courses through it. It was absolutely worth the wait, but it made me angry that it was just dumped on and lumped in, as if it was mere flavouring for The Secret Agent, as opposed to a gorgeous dish in its own right. So in some ways, it wasn’t worth the wait, because its UK release still leaves a slight bitter aftertaste.

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Searching for Pictures of Ghosts

Cinema is dead. Or so they say. To get clicks their way. It isn’t. However, that isn’t to say that it isn’t shedding limbs, leaving phantoms in the places where we used to expect to see certain things. Maybe one of those limbs is UK distribution for festival films, or more accurately, independent, auteurist films, screened at international film festivals. During our 2024 London Film Festival [LFF] coverage, Dario reflected on Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest (2024), wondering whether it would be released and whether it would have a life beyond festivals.

As I write this, the film is in cinemas and will be on MUBI from mid-August. I’m excited to see it, having read a lot about it and being a big fan of her previous work, most notably 2015’s Chevalier. When Dario expressed doubt that the film would have a life beyond the festival circuit I had much less doubt. I felt sure, given the cast and pedigree of Tsangari’s previous work, that it would surface. However in the last couple of months I have found my optimism for this eventuality checked considerably as I have realised and remembered what has not emerged from the festival circuit to accessible screens, theatrical or otherwise.

Harvest was shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Safdie Brothers, Alex Ross Perry etc.). Price Williams’s debut feature as director, The Sweet East (2023), which premiered at Cannes before playing festivals including London. It was recently made available to rent or buy on Amazon, but there was no release, per se. It just appeared. The last couple of years have seen a slowing down of an already glacial pace between festival premiere and theatrical release with films by Alice Rohrwacher and Kelly Reichardt taking well over a year to reach UK theatrical audiences.

The latter’s previous film, Showing Up (2022), was released, a la The Sweet East, with very little fanfare, in the embers of 2023 - having premiered at Cannes in 2022 - on digital platforms to rent. Nary a cinema screening outside London in sight for one of America’s greatest living filmmakers. At the time of writing her new film, The Mastermind (2025) starring Josh O’Connor, premiered to strong reviews at Cannes in May, is due to be released in Cinemas this October, thanks to its acquisition by MUBI. But MUBI (& New Wave, Peccadillo, Anti-Worlds, Altitude etc.) can’t do it all in terms of UK cinema releasing and some filmmakers have not benefitted from similar patronage of late.

A similar fate befell Annie Baker’s debut feature Janet Planet (2023) and there’s a case that her film, a gorgeously shot 16mm family drama that contains a quiet cinematic lyricism alongside Baker’s famed character acumen, as well as Reichardt and others befalling the same fate are too American, too indie, to play to UK audiences. But this doesn’t track, looking at British cinema exhibition’s celebration of and at times blind devotion to American product, ranging from classic Hollywood through the Blockbuster era, and including its embrace of Indiewood darlings such as Quentin Tarantino et al. The UK exhibition and distribution sector has always been in thrall to US cinematic output, for good or mostly for ill.

Film students commonly arrive with a desire to be the next Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Ryan Coogler or yes, still, Tarantino or David Fincher. Only, arguably, Edgar Wright and Christopher Nolan are contemporary UK born filmmakers who inspire the same youthful, aspirational born reverence en masse, and it’s been a long time since they made work that felt British. Their period excursions (Dunkirk, 2017, or Last Night in Soho, 2021) come flavoured with the classic (read: American/Hollywood) movie textures of their imported-to-the-UK screen predecessors, despite what they might claim in interviews with UK outlets around release.

In Spring of 2024 I was supervising an MA student’s screenplay project and we were talking about where the film he was writing could be situated aesthetically, tonally, spiritually and he claimed he was having doubts about the whole thing because it felt too close to a film he’d just seen. Bertrand Mandico’s She is Conann (2023). The film premiered in Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2023, but a year on, there was nowhere to see the film and no indication that its release was imminent. I wanted to see the film to help the student contextualise their work, so they shared a file with me from the torrent site where they saw the film. I vowed to them and myself that I would buy the film if it was ever released.

The realisation dawns on me as I work on this piece that maybe I could just stream these films illegally, via torrent sites. I want to do that when a filmmaker whose work I am dying to see, and whose email I have found, politely declines to engage with me. Maybe I just find this film anyway. It must be out there. I just checked to see if there was any movement on Connan and a UK release, and the mighty Anti-Worlds are putting it out. Huzzah. I can pay for it at last. And more significantly, UK audiences can spend time with a genuinely original and enthralling piece of cinematic joy. Over two years since the film entered the screening world.

I have watchlists in many places. In my journal, I have a mix of long, scrawled lists and smaller ones updated at the start of each month with intended viewing. As the academic year slows, I make a list of what I want to watch over the summer. This year, the thinking about that list coincided with listening to podcasts from the Cannes Film Festival, mostly the brilliant The Last Thing I Saw, alongside Little Gold Men’s coverage, which included, for the first time, a few daily missives.

One of the things I love about The Last Thing I Saw is host Nicolas Rapold’s festival coverage - Berlin, Sundance, Cannes etc. - as it allows me to build a watchlist that comes from excitedly listening to some of the best critical minds in film talking with balanced enthusiasm about what’s coming in cinematic terms. This watchlist is on my Letterboxd. This list is smaller, much smaller, than my JustWatch or MUBI Watchlists. So it felt manageable to try to work through some of the films I have been excited about from film festivals over the last couple of years that have passed me by in 2023 and 2024.

I started to check out the availability on streaming (including digital rental and purchase) as well as physical media, of the films on my Watchlist. In some instances I wasn’t overly surprised that certain titles weren’t available. My favourite film I saw at the London Film Festival in 2023 was Wei Shujun’s Only The River Flows (2023). I had been excited to see that since hearing about its festival debut earlier that year and even though it emerged in cinemas and on MUBI in the second half of 2024 I hadn’t seen something that can often happen, that other, earlier films by the same filmmaker get swept up and made available.

It felt like a good moment to capitalise on the strong word on the delightfully Noirish Only the River Flows, and introduce audiences to more work by an emerging and brilliant filmmaker. It was no surprise that 2020’s Striding into the Wind and 2021’s Ripples of Life, for example, haven’t seen UK screenings, despite Shujun’s growing reputation. It was more of a surprise to see the names of other directors and realise their films, similarly well received at festivals, had no UK activity beyond a rare LFF, or on occasion, regional festival screenings. The names on the list of even my personal and scattershot Letterboxd list make for sobering ready for cinephiles.

Hong Sangsoo, Angela Schanelec, Michel Gondry, Kleber Mendonca Filho, Pietro Marcello, Quentin Dupieux, and Roberto Minervini. Within that list there are some outlying considerations. Hong Sangsoo, despite being one of the most regarded filmmakers working is also incredibly prolific and many distribution companies would and do struggle to keep up with his output. That said, it’s infuriating that so little of his work reaches UK shores in any considerable way. The title on my list was 2023’s In Water, the blurry/out of focus one.

Minverini’s The Damned (2024) was playing in Amsterdam when I was there in May, so maybe that’s slowly making its way here. Quentin Dupieux’s work has been released eventually, usually on MUBI, so there’s hope that 2023’s Daaaaaaali! will eventually see the light of day on these shores. There is much less hope attached to films by the other filmmakers mentioned, and acclaimed festival releases including Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait (2023), Carson Lund’s Eephus (2024) and Joana Arnow’s The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023).

Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet (2022) is maybe the least surprising un-release. Apart from Martin Eden (2019) his work has appeared on UK screens scattershot. What is a tad surprising is that given the success of Martin Eden, his follow-up, which received similar notices, failed to emerge in any way. Maybe the most surprising in terms of previous releases and general cinephilic stature is Michel Gondry. It’s hard to believe a filmmaker with a film that regularly features high on any list of the best films of the century so far, 2004’s sublime Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, can’t get arrested with a film that seemed to charm and delight critics and audiences at Cannes in 2023, The Book of Solutions.

Maybe the most intriguing and infuriating case for me personally is the film that gives this piece its title. Following international success with his first three narrative features; Neighbouring Sounds (2012) Aquarius (2016) and then Bacurau (2019) - the latter co-directed with Juliano Dornelles - Kleber Mendonça Filho directed a documentary about cinema, and in particular the cinemas of Recife in Brazil where he is from. Pictures of Ghosts (2023) remains unseen on UK screens. Is it because it was his Covid project? Or is it anti-documentary bias? What feels ironic is that a film about the changing nature of cinema-going and theatrical exhibition, and the cultural and community power of cinema (from what I’ve gleaned) is unavailable in a place stumbling (nay charging headlong) into a similar state in terms of its relationship with filmgoing and film culture.

This is not MUBI commissioned post, but you can still get 30 days free streaming using mubi.com/dario

It would be easy to say that maybe the tide has turned on feeling toward Mendonça Filho but The Secret Agent (2025) was a hit at Cannes and was acquired by, yep, MUBI, and looks set for a big autumn rollout for awards season. These films then feel like possible victims of the overwhelming abundance of film culture that is available in various forms physically and digitally. Maybe there just is, too much stuff. This may be part of it, but it doesn’t make sense to not make these films available to rent or buy digitally in some form, given the ability to engage with film culture in different forms, and given that these films have already been launched, and for the most part, with positive reviews and word of mouth, and often are by filmmakers with reliable track records for being if not consistent in quality, consistent in being aesthetically, thematically and formally interesting.

It feels churlish to a degree, to be lamenting this relatively small cadre of films, akin to losing pennies down the back of the sofa but it feels like a gap, like omissions, that deserve attention being drawn to. There is great work being done to screen work that isn’t readily available at the ICA’s Off Circuit season. As it says on the ICA’s website:

“Cinema in 2023 finds itself in a very different position than it did in 1968. Amidst a rampant corporatisation and generally insipid and risk-averse spirit, it is easy to become despondent about the future of cinema today, to wonder if we are in that ‘ignominious, irreversible decline’ that Susan Sontag wrote about more than two decades ago. In a time of artistic uniformity, of remarkably style-less house styles, the need for spaces dedicated to truly independent and original voices is as desperate in 2023 as it was in 1968. The obstacles may have changed but the necessity of overcoming them has not.

As the spaces dedicated to showcasing work outside the commercial sphere continue to shrink, the life cycle for a film beyond its festival run remains uncertain […]  Off-circuit aims to provide a platform to new films that have yet to receive a proper spotlight in the UK, facilitating a continuous connection between these profoundly rich works and audiences on the lookout for something new and different. Off-Circuit offers audiences a chance to encounter this generation’s landmark films on screen for the very first time, carving out a much-needed theatrical space for this generation’s seminal and medium-redefining artists”.

Bravo ICA, but what if you don’t live in London, or can’t make it that week a certain title screens [or have a few hundred quid to throw at the trip to the smoke]? My Substack feed is a continuous stream of articles celebrating the revitalisation of old titles through festivals such as Il Cinema Ritrovato and Cinema Rediscovered - and the many boutique physical media labels that take many of those titles screened and release them for audiences at home, such as the wonderful, nascent label, Radiance - and excited, HOPEful talk of a new nondependent cinema (NonDē).

The past and the future, but as yet, at least to my eyes, nothing of the brand new, the right now, the still smouldering. And this is where I feel recent films have been allowed to slip through the cracks of visibility. As I am writing, I learn about ‘The Popcorn List’, which is a touring showcase of independent works that don’t have traditional release infrastructures around them, so it seems that there is a move to classifying and screening films in this mode. Though at present it’s US only it seems to be able to see these films. Hopefully that will change.

Maybe some of these films and filmmakers could be claimed by one of the many energetic causes, organisations, individuals who do such great work on long-forgotten films, rather than waiting 20-30 years to retrieve these titles and their kin from similar fate. Similarly, what if the emergent, NonDē movement invited some of these forgotten films and filmmakers into the fold? Maybe they have and I’ve missed it. Similarly, I wonder if it falls to the BFI to take responsibility for finding these films a home, if nowhere else than their BFI Player. Surely part of its function is to share work that would otherwise be forgotten, as much as it is to share work that has been rescued from oblivion. Either for subscribers or as standalone rentals.

A conversation with a colleague who told me of a Scottish Indie feature, Silent Roar (2023), that has finally managed to secure a space on the player brought this to mind, and reminded me of trying to get my own feature ‘Wilderness’ (2016) onto the service. It felt like pitching the film to all the other streaming services and providers, but it shouldn’t have, because the BFI should be different, shouldn’t it? I will be looking into these options and avenues, as this is a subject that is of real interest to me.

The pull of the old is powerful. When curated well, a focus on the past can be riveting and I am not immune to its charms. Currently on the BFI player is a season of films pulled from the archive of the brilliant BBC endeavour, Moviedrome. It is fantastic to see space given over to work that thrilled me in the 90s, as well as gems I’ve missed, as I started my cinephilic journey. Part of what Moviedrome inculcated in me was curiosity. So it’s frustrating when that curiosity hits what feels like a needless and confusing wall of obstruction.

I have reached out to several of the filmmakers and their representatives listed above, and production companies and UK/European distributors about this issue (it’s not Brexit’s fault, is it?). This is for a podcast episode for the new season, and maybe a written piece to accompany it, because I feel like there is a lot here. I want to know how filmmakers feel about this phenomena. About making work and having a previously supportive audience cut off from you, for work that is well-received and that UK and international critics have shown audible and written excitement for, or where a growing audience that seemed possible from international festival success was nipped in the bud.

I like, in a critical sense, how messy this is. As in, it would make sense if there were an easy pattern to discern. Sexism, anti-American sentiment, a move towards only releasing franchise movies, but none of those track. And I’m reminded while thinking about these gaps from filmographies that I have been lamenting similar for a few years, works that by all accounts haven’t been released in their country of origin with glowing reports of their quality, that one of my favourite filmmakers has suffered this fate, in addition to arguably the fate suffered by Mia Hansen-Løve, mentioned in the notes below.

Steven Soderbergh’s HBO backed, Meryl Streep-starring Let Them All Talk (2020) is nowhere to be seen. Presumably if Soderbergh had the rights he’d just put it up online, as he did with this quirky Covid-produced series Command Z in 2023. In 2025 Soderbergh has had two films released in UK cinemas Presence (2024) and Black Bag (2025), with another, The Christophers (2025) premiering at autumn festivals. How has this one slipped through the net? it can’t be because it’s worse than the other three films he has released between High Flying Bird (2019) and No Sudden Move (2021), because they all fared similarly critically and with audiences. All films nestle between 6.1 and 6.4 on the scientifically super-reliable IMDb scale.

My data set is admittedly small, and based on recent cinema I’ve loved or yearned to see, or longstanding familiarity with and a certain loyalty to certain filmmakers. And, a lot of this comes from a real sadness at not being able to see the most recent film by one of my favourite filmmakers, and being able to talk to Dario about it. Angela Schanelec’s Music played at Berlin in 2023, and Dario saw it there. His response made me want to talk to him about it. I remember the profound experience of seeing Schanelec’s previous film, I Was At Home, But… (2019) at the brilliant Berlinale where Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019) memorably premiered and I first encountered the incredible Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace (2019).

I was thrilled when I Was At Home, But… turned up on MUBI, where I had been introduced to many of Schanelec’s works via a part-retrospective, and I could revisit it. I hoped that Music would play the digital press room at LFF in 2023 but it didn’t, despite strong showings for the film at both NYFF and TIFF. I waited for its release at some point digitally, in some form. I’m still waiting. I know the film is challenging, by all accounts, but more than I Was At Home, But…? And what if it is?

Similarly challenging work by [anglo-white] men has been released in that time, and work that has been less critically well-received (yes I’m looking at you Ari Aster) and I find it sad when looking at the delay in release or neglecting of release for the films listed here how many of them are made by women, or people of colour, or those for whom English isn’t a first language. Surely this isn’t another example of where progress in one area (production funding) is downright pointless if not maliciously undermined when considering another (international distribution).

Part of me wants to set up my own distribution company to get some of these films released. I can see now what Pat Kelman means when he talks about starting 606 Distribution because he saw a film at a festival that he loved and badly wanted to share it with audiences. However I haven’t seen most of the films I’m discussing here. And, part of the issue is surely the perilous state of UK distribution. And, in truth, the urge is a reflex of wanting to run away from the crumbling towers of Academia I currently inhabit (and my own body and self) and I know it’s foolish to jump from the university frying pan into the UK distribution fire.

And as I work on the ending of this piece for now, I’m drawn to thinking about recent guest Alex Ross Perry and his situation with Videoheaven (2025). It’s an admittedly three-hour video essay about video stores, but Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), is just shy of that and Oppenheimer (2023) longer than it. And, Videoheaven doesn’t feel three-hours long. And, it’s a beautiful collection of texts that have for the most part been available on UK screens. I think it’s telling too, from a UK perspective, that Videoheaven premiered at Rotterdam, where UK outlets and critics saw the film and engaged with Alex about it, and yet our own, and arguably only, UK documentary festival, Sheffield’s DocFEST, turned down the film. Are we just only interested in text now, and not context? Not at all?

Given what I mention about about NonDē embracing existing works as exemplars, Alex talked one the pod about the film being available to screen for film societies direct from Cinema Conservancy. His brilliant interview about the film, and Pavements, for MUBI Notebook, suggest he is embracing different ways of making and sharing his work.

There’s more to write, and more to think about and learn and uncover. This is very much a first draft, a collection of initial thoughts. If you have anything to add or share, please reach out, and also, if you have films or filmmakers where you feel this fate has been suffered by them, please let me know, I’d love to add to this list. At time of publication of this, one filmmaker has agreed to talk to me (and hopefully share the film with me), one has declined, and I’m yet to hear from others. What will break my heart is getting to the end of this road, and being no closer to seeing any of these films, legally, in ways that will help the filmmakers.

NOTES:

I am aware of recent controversy over MUBI’s decision to accept venture capital funding from a company with ties to Israel - https://www.screendaily.com/news/mubi-responds-to-criticism-of-investment-from-sequoia-capital/5206073.article

MUBI have recently supported the release of Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island (2021) and One Fine Morning (2022), and most of her early work is readily available in various places, but her 2018 film Maya has never seen the light of day here.

While working on my list of films of the century (see my recs below), I remembered Rachel Lang’s brilliant Baden Baden from 2016 [screened on MUBI, of course]. I searched to see if she’d made a follow-up feature film. She has, Our Men, from 2021, which has never received a UK release.

September 2025

…Pictures of Ghosts [Update #1]

This is more for me than anyone else really, a place to note things, but given I wrote at length about this recently here I thought it worthwhile to update on some developments, directly and indirectly related. One short note, related to the above, is that the BFI recently had a lot of Walerian Borowczyk’s most notable films including The Beast (1975) but with rights expirations I guess, they aren’t there now. And aren’t anywhere else either. My struggle to see Angela Schanelec’s Music (2023) goes on, with a teasing pain, in that the ICA has a retrospective of her work, including screenings of Music, but I can’t make it up to London. It made me think that the next phase of the writing may be thinking of the travails of being a Cinephile in the regions and nations. If you are London-based, go for me, yeah? Finally, in a weird piece of learning that pertains to a lot of what I write about, but mention specifically in the case of the filmmaker Rachel Lang, there is Bottoms (Seligman, 2023).

I have a dissertation student who wants to write about the film in relation to its representation of Queer protagonists in an American coming of age comedy. I had seen the film listed on Amazon Prime and really loved Seligman’s feature debut, Shiva Baby (2020), so I said I’d watch it ahead of our next tutorial, so we could talk in more depth about it. I went to rent it, and could I find it? Could I fuck? Not streaming, not rentable, not buyable digitally, not on physical release. A new kind of ghost. What is going on with the rights issues here that a film can be on a streaming platform for less than a year (after festivals, etc.) and then disappear completely from legal channels? I find it bizarre and scary. I wish it were even to do with scarcity and value, the lure of the limited, but it’s not, because that’s not part of the release of Bottoms, or the many other films I fear fall into this category. If you have or know of a torrent file, hook me up please. I’m done caring about paying for stuff when it’s treated in this way.

October 2025

…Pictures of Ghosts [Update #2]

This month I watched, emanating from that period and piece I wrote about before summer break, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest (2024) and Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East (2023). I loved both in different ways. They are connected in that Price Williams shot the former. I watched them in a double bill. Sweet East first. I think Harvest is one of, if not my, favourite films of the year.

May 2026

…Pictures of Ghosts [Update #3]

Which leaves us in the here and now, for now, of spring 2026. Harvest ended up being one of my top films of 2025 and it was delightful to not only see The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s latest, at London Film Festival, but to see it get such a grand release and roll-out. Maybe it’s just slower now, like The Mastermind itself. Maybe we just need to be more patient in the provinces. Earlier this month I watched Bottoms, which not long after my rant in update #1, appeared on MUBI [yep, them again]. It’s an absolute joy. It’s hilarious, brilliantly scripted and cast, and it’s mind-boggling why it’s not more widely available. For me it’s the equal of a Superbad (Mottola, 2007) or a Booksmart (Wilde, 2019), films I both really like.

To close this out, I want to do a quick scan of that original piece and see what’s left that is still unavailable to see in the UK online in any form and that still hasn’t received any kind of official release.

She is Conann - still not out yet. But it will be soon. And the UK blu-ray release from Anti-WORLDS features an essay on the film and Mandico’s work by me.

In Water - is available, on Blu-ray, from Terracotta [import], for £42.99!!! Which feels steep for a film I haven’t seen and may not like enough to watch twice. No rental.

Music - No rental. No sale.

The Book of Solutions - No rental. No sale. I nearly asked Michel Gondry about this film when he attended the Encounters film festival in Bristol in September 2025, with Charlie Kaufman, for a special screening of Eternal Sunshine, and to screen their latest shorts, independent of each other. I was a bit starstruck to see Kaufman in the flesh, he’s someone whose work and philosophy I deeply admire, but it was the context. A short film festival, in Bristol, and he and Gondry were just there, hanging out, watching films, being cinephiles. Gondry asked a question about Mark Jenkin’s short film I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, in a Q&A, to producer Denzil Monk. Surreal. They both looked like they were having a nice time. I didn’t have the heart to depress Michel with questions about why The Book of Solutions had never alighted on these shores.

Pictures of Ghosts - MUBI

Scarlet - No rental. No sale.

Daaaaaalí! - No rental. No sale.

The Damned - No rental. No sale.

Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait - No rental. No sale. I have started to programme screenings of films again. That programming/curating itch wouldn’t subside. I have reached out to the filmmaker Luke Fowler about screening this at an event in the autumn.

Eephus - No rental. No sale. This film popped up on so many ‘best of 2025’ lists and stars the now-late Frederick Wiseman. And yet…

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed - No rental. No sale.

Let Them All Talk - No rental. No sale. The Christophers is getting a wide release, and HBO Max has launched in the UK, and yet, still no sign of this Soderbergh film.