What’s On Week Ahead

Sat 18 July - Sun 13 Sept

Open your animal eyes. An immersive exhibition of groundbreaking video games & virtual reality. A must-do this summer in Bristol's Undershed Gallery.

Until Thu 30 Jul

With a star-studded cast including Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya and Charlize Theron, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is the most anticipated film on Letterboxd for 2026.

Until Mon 20 Jul

When their plan to book a show at the Rivoli goes horribly wrong, Matt and Jay accidentally travel back to the year 2008.

Until Wed 22 Jul

Joe and Angela’s marriage is on thin ice. When they invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbours for a dinner party, the night spirals into unexpected places. Have they reignited the spark or lit the match that burns it all down?

Based on the series of books by Patrick O'Brian and directed by Peter Weir, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World follows the fate of the crew of the HMS Surprise - a British Naval ship on a frantic search for their adversary, the French Man-O-War Acheron, during the Napoleonic war.

Until Wed 22 Jul

Surviving bar-to-bar on anecdotes and the ‘good old days’, two blustery 50-somethings hatch a plan to change their luck by digging up the cash their old pal buried before he left for Argentina.

Sun 19 & Wed 22 July

As a tribute to the late Marjane Satrapi, we're screening the film adaptation of her graphic novel that follows a young girl in Iran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Until Wed 22 Jul

In the late 1990s, a family of six settles into their new home on Vancouver Island, as internal dynamics are slowly revealed through the experiences of the youngest child, Sasha. Their fresh start is interrupted by the increasingly dangerous behavior of Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.

Join some of the most inspiring voices in the worlds of exhibition, distribution and restoration to reflect on the rise of rep cinema over the past decade; and what that might mean for the future of cinema.

To celebrate Il Cinema Ritrovato turning forty and Cinema Rediscovered turning ten, we are delighted to welcome Il Cinema Ritrovato’s Co-director Ehsan Khoshbakht, for a conversation with our founder Mark Cosgrove hosted by film critic, historian and long-standing collaborator Pamela Hutchinson.

Relationship trouble? Choosing dinner? Look out for our Danger: Diabolik Hotline. Dial for Diabolik: the suave super-villain from the Giussani sisters’ camp 1960’s comic. To join in, find the phone booth in Watershed’s Café & Bar and ask for counsel from our very own agony-aunt. Warning - follow his advice at your own risk!

Based on an iconic Italian comic, Mario Bava’s stylish cult classic has been an inspiration to many from the Beastie Boys to acclaimed British filmmaker Edgar Wright, who will present a pre-recorded introduction to the film.

Opposite Everyman Bristol

Bristol has been an UNESCO City of Film since 2017, but Bristol and cinema have been entwined since – some would say before – the beginning of moving pictures. Join local enthusiast and historian Mark Fuller for the first of three gentle walks.

Deeply personal, beautifully realised, and symbolically obscure, Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film directed outside of his home country stands as a testament to his own conflicting thoughts regarding Russia as he considered a self-proclaimed exile.

Chabrol’s ice cold tale of infidelity, passion and violence – an unmissable Hitchcockian thriller set against a backdrop of bourgeois respectability in late 1960’s Versailles which inspired Andrey Zvyagintsev's Cannes 2026 Grand Prix winner Minotaur.

Thu 23 - Fri 24 July

Charles Burnett’s deeply humanist follow-up to Killer of Sheep centres on Pierce Mundy caught between family expectations and loyalty to a friend, providing an intimate window into early ’80s South Central LA.

Join Jake Garriock (Curzon Head of Distribution strategy and group publicity), Mark Cosgrove (Cinema Rediscovered Founder) and guests for a look at the influential UK distributor of indie foreign language and arthouse films, past present and future...

Thu 23 - Sun 26 July

Come and find out how a film archive works in this new exhibition on display in W1 throughout the festival. All welcome including younger guests in this free drop-in space hosted by the BFI National Archive team.

An important milestone of Black South African cinematic history that lives on in cultural memory, African Jim introduced the singular jazz singer and activist Dolly Rathebe to the big screen.

Thu 23 & Sat 25 July

Get insights into the creation of the Peter Gabriel’s award-winning Sledgehammer music video featuring innovative stop-motion animation by Aardman and the Brothers Quay.

Set in the final hours before a nuclear war threatens to wipe out humanity, Andrei Tarkovsky’s visionary final film is a visually breathtaking meditation on existential terror and a melancholic swan song from one of cinema’s true auteurs.

Join Aardman’s co-founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord for a rare 40th anniversary screening of Channel 4’s 1986 cult animated shorts programme Sweet Disaster which includes their rarely screened Babylon, amongst other bold experimental work from Aardman alumni and beyond.

Berlin-based director Cynthia Beatt’s first feature shot shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall centres on Queenie (a spellbinding performance by a young Tilda Swinton), a woman navigating a personal crisis.

Tsai Ming-Liang's poignant love letter to cinema is an exquisite, wryly funny and tender tribute to the experience of cinemagoing, to cinemas as spaces, and to the people in the audience and behind the scenes. 

An anonymous tip starts a traditional whodunnit which quickly segues into a surrealistic farce and moves from film noir to science fiction in the mysterious and enigmatic Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel.

Experience the visionary sounds of Estonian pioneer of electronic music, Sven Grünberg, the first composer in the Soviet Union to create an album entirely made of electronic music.

Mike Figgis’ beautifully lurid descent into Las Vegas oblivion is anchored by two career defining - and award winning - performances from Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue.

Arundhati Roy’s debut screenplay captures 1970s student rebellion in New Delhi, set against a vibrant backdrop of Marxism, parties and Beatles songs.

Join The Pretend Company for this first of two Improv Cinema Club sessions, a unique opportunity to explore some of the films presented at Cinema Rediscovered in a nuanced and in-depth way.

Fri 24 & Sun 26 July

Join Watershed’s Charlotte Bendrey and BFI National Archive Curator Rosie Taylor on a tour of Watershed’s projection booth and discover how the films screening at the festival make it to the screen during a festival like Cinema Rediscovered.

Four city boys embark on a countryside holiday that will transform them in this quietly incisive gem from Satyajit Ray, presented in a stunning new 4K restoration spearheaded by Wes Anderson, and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation.

A humorous insider critique of 1950s Parisien cinephile scene by filmmaker, critic, and producer Luc Moullet who began writing for Cahiers du Cinéma at the age of 18 alongside figures like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.  

Join Professor Shawn Sobers, Simon Bright (Zimbabwe) and fellow filmmaker Martin Mhando (Tanzania) to watch Corridors of Freedom (1987) and reflect on the vibrant collaboration and resistance of the Southern African Transnational Cinema movement that emerged in the 1980s and 90s to counter South Africa’s apartheid propaganda and the media biases of former colonial powers.

In this Lunchtime Talk, mechanical sculptor Nik Ramage will present a collection of his useless machines and absurd devices, revealing the stories behind their creation - and the ideas that never made it off the drawing board.

Interested in meeting some of the film curators involved in Cinema Rediscovered and getting insights into how the festival gets programmed? For those of you interested in pitching an event or season for next year’s edition of the festival, this is also a great opportunity to pick up practical tips from those involved in our Other Ways of Seeing commissions supported by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

Claude Chabrol’s masterful thriller hinges on the unlikely bond between a schoolmistress and a butcher and the unsettling possibility that all might not be what it seems as a wave of murders grip their small idyllic French village.

Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker star in a study of masculine malaise among the academic elite told through the elliptical rhythms of Harold Pinter's’ script and cool and penetratingly detached direction of Joseph Losey.

Crafted by renowned poet and screenwriter Ahmed Bouanani, this experimental masterpiece draws from Morocco’s rich oral traditions, and the ever-present spectre of colonialism.

20th Century Flicks Kino

Before the era of YouTube mashups came The Movie Orgy (1968), an immense found footage cultural catalogue curated by legendary director Joe Dante in his debut feature.

A schoolteacher (the late Diane Keaton in one of her most striking performances) living alone spends her evenings frequenting late-night bars and picking up men in this dark complex drama.

This first and only feature film directed (and edited) by Park Nam-ok, South Korea's first female filmmaker, provides an intimate look at the female experience in post-war Seoul.

The film the British Board of Film Censors didn’t want you to see… until the world changed.

A gritty crime drama focusing on the intense, cat-and-mouse relationship between Inspector Chan and a drug informant, exploring corruption and the "rules of the game" in 1970s Hong Kong.

A conservative Midwestern patriarch has his world shaken when he must search for his missing daughter in the seedy underworld of the California sex industry in this bleak psychological neo-noir from Paul Schrader.

Set against the gritty backdrop of 1990s New York City, this postmodern reimagining of the Dracula myth, executive produced by David Lynch, follows estranged vampire twins as they reunite after their father’s death.

Join us before the screening of Closed Circuit (1978) in Cinema 2, for a murder mystery inspired by the film. This interactive event will be taking place in Waterside 1, and will pull details from the film, but without giving away whodunit!

Fiction becomes reality for an audience quietly watching a matinee of a spaghetti western at their local cinema when suddenly one of the patrons dies…