The BFI is to bestow its highest honour, a Fellowship, on the acclaimed British artist and director, Steve McQueen. McQueen rose to prominence when he won the Turner Prize for modern art in 1999, with a short film that reflected on the work of Buster Keaton. But his subsequent directing career, starting with the IRA […]
One of America’s best loved comedians, Mel Brooks, has been honoured by the BFI with a Fellowship. The eighty-eight year old director, producer, actor, writer and stand-up received the BFI’s highest award at an event in London, ahead of his one-man show at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Brooks – best known for satires and […]
The British film industry elite have announced their nominations for this year’s BAFTAs and unusually, it’s an American film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, that has the most nods, eleven. But two British Oscar front-runners, The Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, about the Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing, are hot on its […]
At an unusually political set of awards at the 2014 London Film Festival, it’s almost as if the BFI is trying to solve the world’s conflict through film; its main honours have been handed to films from Ukraine, Russia and Syria. Despite the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, film makers from the two countries have […]
One of Hollywood’s most respected actors, Al Pacino, has been honoured with a BFI Fellowship. At a ceremony at the Corinthia Hotel in London, Pacino said he was overwhelmed to be given the BFI’s highest accolade. The chairman of the BFI, Greg Dyke, said, Pacino’s extraordinary body of work had made him one of the […]
Returning to the Second World War for the first time since Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt will close the London Film Festival with Fury, in which he stars as a sergeant, leading a tank crew behind enemy lines in April 1945. Fury is directed by David Ayer, whose End of Watch screened at the […]
BFI bosses have been meeting film producers in London today, to explain its new “Three Ticks” policy that aims to ensure diversity in the British film business. Under the scheme, producers won’t be able to receive funding from Britain’s biggest public film fund unless they meet certain criteria, to increase the representation of women, gay […]
The BFI has picked The Imitation Game, about the life of the wartime code-breaker Alan Turing, top open the 58th London Film Festival in October. The film’s stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley are expected to attend its European premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square, alongside the director Morten Tyldum; the screening will be shown […]
BFI staff posing in “Pits and Perverts” T-shirts to promote Pride, closing the Directors Fortnight at Cannes 2014 On Monday over lunch, the head of the BFI Film Find, Ben Roberts, proudly boasted to a group of British reviewers about the work the organisation has been doing over the past year. With two British directors […]
Cinema audiences in the UK and the Irish Republic spent more than a billion pounds to see films released in 2013. It’s the third year in a row that the figure has been passed. With 165.5 million tickets sold, there were 4% fewer cinema visits than the previous year, but with slightly higher ticket prices, […]