“I have never felt so comfortable in a cinema before,” said someone in the front row. I have hosted many post-film Q&As and discussions, but this was the first time I felt at a loss for words. The moment came at the end of a ‘relaxed screening’ event I programmed at the Barbican as part of their Emerging Film Curators series, following a lab of classes last year. Entitled ‘Stims: Towards a Neurodiverse Cinema’, the event showcased a series of short films from animated documentary to sci-fi and experimental, exclusively directed by neurodivergent filmmakers.

It felt like the apotheosis of work I have been doing for the past couple of years, working on the Autism Through Cinema project and podcast with Queen Mary University of London which frames cinema through an autistic lens, and hosting relaxed screenings at the BFI and The Garden Cinema. ‘Stims’ was the first event I had cobbled together from scratch, from ensuring the lighting and sound at the Barbican were at just the right level to acquiring the rights to screen the films and bringing several of the filmmakers to London for a panel discussion.

It turns out programming Stims wasn’t apotheosis but genesis – when that person took the mic to tell me how they had never felt welcome in cinema spaces, or felt like a valued part of an audience, I knew that this was something I have to pursue further. Yet making a personal mark on cinema exhibition is a big thing to take on, especially at lofty institutions like the Barbican. It can seem very overwhelming without knowing where to begin, especially for those of us to whom networking does not come naturally. I decided to talk to my fellow Emerging Curators to see what they made of the process, and the response they received from the programmes they lovingly prepared.

The first event in the series was curated by film journalist and programmer Cici Peng. Her screening was called ‘Visions from the Wake: Grief and its Afterlives in Global Cinema’, featuring short films exploring modes of mourning from filmmakers of the diaspora. “The event was really special because it was reflective of personal experiences of loss, in a structural context,” Cici tells me. “I had so many people tell me about their own relationship to grief after the screening, which touched me deeply.”

The films in Cici’s programme ranged from Mati Diop’s 2009 short film Atlantiques to Your Father was Born 100 Years Old, and So was the Nakba, a Google Maps view of Palestine directed by Razan AlSalah. “I think allowing these films to enter conversation with each other facilitates new modes of thinking about grief as a radical kind of empathy across borders for diasporic communities.” Peng said. I asked her what challenges she feels that young curators face. “Screen Daily reported the local box office for UK indie films has dropped by 49% in 2023 post-Covid. While this summer, the industry was marking Barbenheimer as the ‘return’ of cinema, the truth is that these huge releases overshadow independent cinema and independent programming and distribution.”

Inspired by Cici’s incisive reflections, I spoke to Issy Macleod who works as a programmer at Picturehouse to see what curation looks like to someone who has managed to turn it into a full-time job. “For freelancers, it becomes a game of who you know through networking,” Issy says. “It’s about building relationships with distributors and studios. Everyone is trying to keep the film industry alive, and even though it can feel difficult at times, distributors want their films to be screened.”

I wondered if Issy has much space to curate the films they are personally passionate about. “I love horror films from countries that don’t often make it to the UK and Westerns, but they don’t translate into box office very easily. So my aim is to slowly cultivate an interest in things I love, such as screening on 35mm which is really popular right now.” When it comes to advice for new curators, Issy says “Repertory programming is a really great way to learn how to book things and to identify the obstacles that you come up against. And reach out to your local cinema, they are often willing to work with new people.”

Screening repertory or archival films can circumvent the complications, including fees, of screening new releases. Teodora Kosanović’s Barbican programme is an evening of rarely screened shorts called ‘Unseen Avant-Gardes: Women Experimental Filmmakers in Yugoslavia, 1960-90’. I asked Teodora how she went about finding the films. “There was a lot of detective work involved, including contacting the families of the filmmakers, trying to find where these films could be and who the rights-holders were.” The desire to curate often comes from stumbling across something online or in an archive that hasn’t been screened before. But where to begin?

“As someone who is starting out in curation, I am happy to see that there is a growing interest in alternative voices and perspectives,” Teodora responds. “Especially looking at historical artworks in a different light and showcasing current works which reflect on our world in more radical and challenging ways.” There’s certainly a political or ideological edge to a lot of the programmes being produced. My own event aimed to demonstrate alternative ways of seeing which neurodivergent filmmakers bring to the film industry, whilst examining the access challenges we face both on set and in an audience watching in a cinema.

The challenge of going it alone can be assuaged by working as a collective, as demonstrated by the final event in the Emerging Curators series. Taking place on 24 March, ‘Changing With The Tides’ is an immersive screening exploring coastal communities and fishing industries over 70 years from 1950s Sivily to 2021 Scotland. It was programmed by three curators: Aryan Tauqueer Khawaja, Sophiya Sian, and Tony Yang. “Film is, after all, a collective experience,” Sophiya reflects. “Collaboration keeps film alive.”

Compared to how we all felt before the Lab, the mentorship from the Barbican’s programming team has given us confidence to develop further ideas and take them forward. As Issy said to me, it is a case of learning through experience, and their advice that curators with ideas should not be afraid to propose them to cinemas is worth repeating. I am already curating my next relaxed event at the Barbican, having learned so much from the first experience. The rewards of the work involved in curating screenings have been felt by all of these young programmers, and we need to help more new voices find their place.

Most of us associate the word ‘horror’ with a cinematic genre: The Exorcist, The Ring, Paranormal Activity, Halloween, Friday the 13th andThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre are a few names that might spring to mind. Some might even recall the voice of Vincent Price, or Michael Jackson’s pioneering Thriller music video.

If you think of movies as a house, a story moves along and develops from the ground up to other floors, branching out along corridors and up staircases. In horror, terror happens on a single floor, always in the present. Even the fear of something supernatural is a present haunting – regardless of what the threat is, horror is pervasive and permeating. Invisible or palpable, creeping up behind you or hiding in the shadows, it has a life of its own and can be almost impossible to fight. A sense of helplessness can easily creep in.

Horror in cinema works the same way as it does in social, cultural, familial or political structures. This is The Horror Show! approach at Somerset House, which positions horror as a reaction to very real issues in modern Britain. And “Show” is the right word for it – the exhibition aims to deliver explanations as to how the youth and its artists have dealt with societal and political issues, using horror as a tool to digest forms of injustice. As John Carpenter says, horror is not a genre, it’s a reaction.

The Horror Show! is a very British take on how some react to the patriarchy. The accompanying book contains graphics reminiscent of Marilyn Manson’s autobiography ‘Long Hard Road Out of Hell’, while the exhibition is set in darkened rooms displaying artworks from Gareth Pugh, Gavin Turk, Juno Calypso and David Shrigley amongst many others. Divided into three main segments, the curators distinguish between Monsters, Ghosts and Witches to make sense out of Thatcher, CCTV and other pertinent societal and political themes

The idea of conjuring up horror imagery to deal with life itself is not new. Lyricism during the time of German Expressionism was born out of the deep trauma that an entire nation was facing after WW1. The shock of those events evoked images of a raging cancer, visible and alive, eating at the hearts and minds and turning them inside out.

All of this was supported by erratic outcries, absurd grammar and deconstructed, made up words that acted as metaphors for a perverted society that gave in to evil. There is a sense of disbelief and terror, not being able to make any sense out of the shock a whole country just experienced: in other words, pure horror. “The horror….the horror…” were Captain Kurtz’s last words in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the words of a man driven mad as a result of the war he witnessed and took part in.

These messages were replicated in paintings and films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with its nightmarish visions of a haunting somnambulist. Later on and in more commercial terms, Germany even recognised the success of horror with the word Angstlust, meaning a lust for fear.

Monsters in postmodern Britain are not quite like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, with the exhibition instead nodding to how Thatcherism influenced the punk movement. Deconstructed clothes and faces with heavy make up were an interpretation of a disturbing reality. Eddie Chambers’ ‘The National Flag’ is a clear image of a country in pieces.

While Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange dominated as ‘Monsters’ of the 70s and 80s, ‘Ghosts’ then took centre stage with the arrival of the internet. Romanticism in literature introduced ghosts before in a different manner, sometimes even close to necrophilia. In the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Baudelaire, the ‘ghost’ was a beloved, beautiful woman. In Shakespeare, ghosts often symbolised karma and reinitiated a state of justice – where the natural order was disturbed, ghosts would appear to haunt until the rightful order was re-established, such as in Macbeth and Hamlet.

Since the dawn of home internet in the 90s, the world has been plagued with invisible E-viruses, bugs, mass data surveillance, initiating a new age of anxiety, homophobia and racism, and enabling a new way to anonymously judge and bully strangers. In Britain, Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham gave this new eeriness a face and shows like Ghostwatch emerged on BBC.

Big Brother embodied the surveillance culture on TV like no other – people chosen for their race and social status enticed viewers to watch the inevitable drama unfold, successfully justifying its threatening slogan “Big Brother is Watching You” borrowed from George Orwell’s 1984, in which the surveillance state was dystopian rather than entertaining. Gavin Turk’s ‘Ghost Pop’ which poses Sid Vicious as Warhol’s Elvis Presley without the pop art colouring, signifies the changing times, and that ultimately there’s no return from death.

Witchcraft – as well as being a popular trend among the hipsters of East London – has deep centuries old roots in Britain through Druids, Pagans and Tarot. Originally, witches were associated with having a close relationship with nature, using its plants and energies to create medicine and magic. In the 70s British classic The Wicker Man shows an uncompromising image of Scottish island people believing in the gods of the elements. Now itches are the new goddesses in human form, a force of nature with millions of hashtags and followers on the ‘gram. They embody resistance and recreation, embracing all of humanity and the earth. A new age of liberated feminism that is rebelliously loud and most of all rising up against the patriarchy.

Whether you have a passion for horror as a genre or not, The Horror Show! delivers an eclectic display of artworks and installations, showcasing how frightening circumstances can be a source of artistic inspiration and provide some temporary relief. Interestingly it also points out how horror rarely affects the upper classes – the haunting and restrictive mechanisms of society seem to be reserved for the young and the broader public, unless you choose to be affected by it. But if you want to see rich people shiver and suffer, there’s the cinema for that.

The Horror Show! runs from 27 October 2022 – 19 February 2023 at Somerset House.

We don’t just make magazines, podcasts and our website here at Little White Lies – every so often, we create a book too. The latest collaboration between Little White lies and Abrams New York is Sofia Coppola: Forever Young, a critical survey of the films of Sofia Coppola, lovingly presented in a hefty full-colour monograph.

Written by our own Digital Editor Hannah Strong, the book features essays on all of Coppola’s work to date, as well as new interviews with her collaborators including Kirsten Dunst, Philippe LeSourd and Nancy Steiner. There are also exclusive behind-the-scenes photographs from Sofia’s close friend Andrew Durham, and a forward written by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher.

To celebrate the release of Sofia Coppola: Forever Young, Hannah will be in New York City and Los Angeles at the end of June/beginning of July to present a number of screenings around Coppola, encompassing both her work and the works that have informed her filmmaking. We’ve partnered with some of our favourite cinemas to put these screenings on, and we’d love it if you could join us. Hannah will be introducing all the films, and signed copies of her book will be available to buy at all of the screenings.

So if you’re free on the east or west coasts, grab a ticket and pick up a book!

New York City

Tue 21 June – Rooftop Cinema Club, Midtown, Lost in Translation (7.30pm)
Wed 22 June – Nitehawk, Prospect Park, The Bling Ring + Drag Show (8.30pm)
Sat 25 June – The Roxy, Tribeca, Marie Antoinette (5.45pm)
Sun 26 June – Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, The Virgin Suicides (1pm)

Los Angeles

Wed 29 June – American Cinematheque Los Feliz, The Bling Ring / To Die For (7pm / 10pm)
Thu 30 June – American Cinematheque Aero, The Virgin Suicides / Picnic at Hanging Rock  (7.30pm)
Fri 1 July – Rooftop Cinema Club DTLA, Lost in Translation (8.30pm)

Following on from their recent Japanese film season the BFI are finally joining us in the muck and programming an Anime season. Lead by programmer Justin Johnson, this first part of the season in April (with more to follow in May) covers a fairly broad scope, from the industry’s foundational works to modern classics to more recent hits. Outside of the following highlights there’s more to discover: such as Eiichi Yamamoto’s vivid watercolour nightmare Belladonna of Sadness (introduced by Helen McCarthy – a crucial voice in anime academia), plus Yamamoto’s 60s series Kimba the White Lion. Then there’s the opportunity to overwhelm your brain with anime on the biggest screen in the UK – with Ghost in the Shell as well as Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle playing in the IMAX. Here’s some of the highlights from their programme, which kicks off on 28 March.

Inu-Oh

The latest film from Masaaki Yuasa – director of Devilman Crybaby, Night is Short, Walk on Girl and Elvis Costello’s favourite TV show of 2021, Keep Your Hands of Eizouken – Inu-Oh is another idiosyncratic feather in the animator’s cap, though it’s also his final one with Science Saru (for now). Based on the novel Tales of the Heike: INU-OH by Hideo Furukawa, a sort of fictionalized spin-off from The Tale of the Heike, Yuasa transforms this historical fiction into an anachronistic rock opera. Inu-Oh follows Tomona, a blind musician specialising in the biwa. He eventually meets and befriends the eponymous Inu-Oh, a noh theatre performer shunned for their atypical appearance – one that also lends him a special talent as a dancer. They strike up a creative partnership that sparks a wild change in the landscape, one that attracts oppressive response from local leaders.

Even for Yuasa the film shows astonishing visual flexibility, mixing realism and abstraction, traditional and modern art, the macabre and the comical; it’s anarchic in the same way its musical deuteragonists are. Like Ride Your Wave before it the film has a surprisingly tragic edge to it too, mournful for the fates of its characters and perhaps in a metatextual sense, the end of Yuasa’s journey with the studio he founded.

Patlabor: The Movie & Patlabor 2: The Movie

Mamoru Oshii has directed no shortage of masterful animated as well as live action films, and the Patlabor series stands proudest among them. Before Oshii made his vastly influential adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, he toyed with questions of technology and totalitarian government, post-human detective mystery and military action with the Patlabor series. Following on from the OVA – well worth seeking out and watching where you can find it – Patlabor: The Movie follows the characters of that short series into a surprisingly granular, procedural investigation involving the manufacturing of big robots and a potential software malfunction, and its far-reaching consequences.

The sequel, Patlabor 2, doubles down on the patient pacing and moody atmosphere of the first, but actually moves away from the first into a deeply involved political allegory for Oshii’s thoughts about post-occupation Japan and the actions of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces. The immense detail and surprising realism in its construction in its use of period-accurate technology alongside the fantasy of its mecha storyline and the complexity of its political themes make it one of Oshii’s most fascinating works. With little in the way of high-def home releases, the chance to see Patlabor in the cinema isn’t to be missed.

Liz and the Blue Bird

A critically-beloved work from Naoko Yamada, one of the best directors currently working in anime and anywhere else, Liz and the Blue Bird has remained somewhat elusive in UK home releases and cinemas until this point. A spin-off from the series Sound Euphonium, it focuses in on two of the show’s supporting characters Mizore and Nozomi, and a sort of unrequited love between them. As in her other works, Yamada’s film evocatively uses flower language in place of what the characters themselves cannot express, used alongside her close attention to body language and animated character acting.

Throughout, Yamada depicts Mizore and Nozomi’s recital of a musical piece from Liz and the Blue Bird, while visualising the fairytale itself that the music is based on through softer, watercolour textures. The coupling of the fairy tale to the real world is delicate and moving, but becomes completely overwhelming in the realisation of Mizore and Nozomi’s musical piece (composed by Sound Euphonium’s Akito Matsuda), their duet of oboe and clarinet representing these fictional characters as well as an expression of their evolving relationship.

Also showing is Yamada’s previous feature, the perhaps better-known A Silent Voice. Another heart-rending, visually ravishing endeavour worth seeing – with a number of the same creative talents on board.

Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors

It’s not just contemporary hits that should grab the attention in this season, but also some looks at the earliest examples of anime. The recently re-discovered and restored WWII propaganda film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors – previously thought burned by the American occupation, as noted in Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements’ The Anime Encyclopaedia. Directed by Mitsuyo Seo, it was the first feature-length anime film, commissioned by Japan’s Naval Ministry after seeing Disney’s Fantasia. It’s influence was so that it inspired the career of Osamu Tezuka, the ‘Godfather of Manga’ and a major figure in shaping the anime industry into what it is today (for good and for plenty of bad).

Ironically, Seo was actually a leftist politically – the booklet for The Roots of Japanese Anime detailing his involvement with the Proletarian Film League of Japan – contradictions which makes Momotaro’s glorification of Japanese imperialism and colonialism morbidly fascinating (and reportedly, a lifelong shame of Seo’s). Similarly, a program of rarely-seen anime shorts details the way the form evolved in the early days of Japanese cinema, including Seo’s Ari-chan the Ant (1941), which shows how the filmmaker had already emulated Disney in his use of the multi-plane camera, these techniques helping lay foundations for the anime industry.

The BFI’s Anime season runs at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX from 28 March – 31 May. Tickets for April are on sale now, tickets for May are on sale from 4 April.

In 1993 Tracey Moffatt’s innovative supernatural horror beDevil became the first feature film directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Like the artist and filmmaker’s prior short, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, it was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, appearing in that year’s Un Certain Regard section.

Despite Moffatt’s international renown as an artist and the fact that it remains her sole feature, beDevil has subsequently been rather surprisingly overlooked. Fortunately, it screens as part of the Barbican’s forthcoming season, Homeland: Films by Australian First Nations directors alongside work by Leah Purcell, Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins and others.

Indebted to Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, beDevil is an anthology horror consisting of three unconnected ghost stories which Moffatt heard as a child from her family. The first, ‘Mr Chuck,’ concerns a young boy who encounters the spirit of an American GI that drowned in a swamp on Bribie Island during World War Two and continues to haunt the locale.

The second, ‘Choo choo choo choo,’ centres on a family living in a house beside a railway track somewhere in the Outback who are beset by the clamour of invisible locomotives and the spirit of a young girl killed on the tracks. Finally, ‘Lovin’ The Spin I’m In’ tells the tragic tale of a couple from the Torres Strait Islands who mysteriously died far too young and are forever compelled to reside in a condemned warehouse.

While it might be understandable that beDevil is regularly characterised as ‘Indigenous Gothic,’ Moffatt herself bristled at those who were only able to engage with her work through the lens of her identity. Across her various modes of art practice, she has addressed Indigenous stories and people, but the stories in beDevil recount hauntings by ghosts of various ethnicities and nationalities and they are plaguing people of similarly diverse backgrounds.

The interplay of cultures is undeniably both prominent and pertinent, but the frame of reference is broad and intersectional. Perhaps as striking as the foregrounding of Indigenous characters is the agency given to women – who act as the primary framing voices for all three stories – as well as characters from immigrant backgrounds or who otherwise don’t conform to societal expectations.

However, the radicalism of the film doesn’t end with issues of representation, and it could be argued that its aesthetic and formal creativity is why beDevil still feels quite so invigorating to a contemporary audience. Visually, the film resembles some of Moffatt’s most famous photographic work, in its use of impressionistic studio sets painted in bright saturated colours – particularly her 1989 series, Something More.

The sets are one area for which Moffatt cited Kwaidan’s influence as well as Australian landscape artists like Russell Drysdale. The design and lighting of the sets, intentionally highlighting their artificiality, is both incredibly evocative and uncannily atmospheric. It also emphasises the layers of story and memory that instruct the film’s form and its thinking about haunting.

Even within the three separate sections of beDevil, there are multiple levels of representation. Two of the three chapters include faux-documentary framing devices alongside the hyper-real presentation of the actual events, while in the third section people recount elements of the narrative within the narrative itself. The layering of story and temporal shifts unmoor us and collapse time, allowing Moffatt to explore the prolonged impact of memories and the way that fables become enmeshed in communities through the years. It feeds into the sense that as much as tales of phantoms, beDevil is about the haunting of a place by its past.

In this sense of landscapes holding on to painful memories, it clearly engages with the specific histories of Australia’s Indigenous populations, but it also speaks more broadly about the nature and impact of remembrance and storytelling. beDevil’s most unnerving aspect might be the potential it posits for the horrors of the past to come crashing, terrifyingly into the present.

beDevil screens as part of Barbican’s Homeland: Films by Australian First Nations directors season, which runs 2-23 February.