The ICO team share their cinematic highlights of 2023. Let us know yours on X or Instagram.
Duncan Carson, Projects & Business Manager
Favourite repertory cinema screenings of 2023
The Devil Queen – The Vito Project @ The Cinema Museum
Hot off the press from the Berlin debut of the restoration of this outrageous Brazilian queer treat, Vito Project programmer Matheus Carvalho served up this delight as part of their Dressed to Thrill: A Series of Films Exploring Dress Code and Gender Expression season. A Caipirinha mixed from equal parts John Waters, Black Narcissus and Pixote, this high watermark of ‘be gay do crime’ was even more fun for filling the Cinema Museum (London’s most underrated screening venue) with a queer audience ready for its perverse delights.
One Hand Don’t Clap @ Barbican
Part of curator (and former FEDS trainee!) Patrice Robinson’s great Caribbean cinema season, this was the instance where it was obvious that time had been taken to get the right people in the room. It was a delight to discover this document of Trinidad’s calypso competition and carnival in 1986 with an audience ready to grind and testify. The post-show Q&A with director Kavery Kaul was a great cross-dialogue with an audience stepped in the pan, able to offer different histories of calypso’s influence than the one we’d just seen on screen.
Rebel Cinema: Ousmane Sembène at 100 @ BFI
The rep cinema proposition falls broadly into two categories for me. Films that I’ve never heard of that the screening helps me discover; and films I’ve wanted to see for the longest time that I haven’t had access to. The rare chance offered by the BFI and curator Chrystel Oloukoï to see all of Ousmane Sembène’s features falls righteously, fist-pumpingly in the second category. Having distributed Mandabi in 2021, I was sorely tempted to succumb to the chance to watch the low-quality versions of his films that float around YouTube. I’m glad I waited. Three new restorations – courtesy of Janus Films – of his features Ceddo, Emitai and Xala, were backed up by the chance to see previous restorations and 35mm prints of his historical epic Camp de Thiaroye (currently unrestored).
It’s been a while since I drank so deeply from a filmmaker in such a short period, and it was a confronting and confirming experience. Ousmane Sembène’s preoccupations – the power of women, the restoration of colonial practices in post-colonial Africa, the grind of petty difference, the resilience and humour of working people – and aesthetics (abrasive, direct) are very consistent across his work. More than almost any other filmmaker his work is an attempt to build a community in exhibition and speak to the issues that his films carefully turn in their hands. Whether UK cinemas are in a position to follow through and build a space for people to gather for potentially revolutionary ends remains something I am turning over.
Toute Une Nuit @ Prince Charles Cinema
Having an afternoon off work, I dipped into the indescribable indulgence of an early afternoon screening of Chantal Akerman’s promenade through abstracted lovers’ meetings. I always wondered who was attending Prince Charles daytime screenings and now I have my answers: a surprisingly large collection of cinema’s most reverent high church worshippers. A beautiful way to meet this, one of the recently crowned Belgian queen’s most elusive yet emphatic works.
La Ciénaga @ The Castle Cinema, programmed by Jellied Reels
Showmanship comes in all kinds of forms. For some, it’s the impassioned intro; for others, it’s the razzle dazzle of an immersive screening. But sometimes the smallest things make the big difference. For Joe Andreyev, Jellied Reels’ eclectically-minded programmer, the non-film on screen material is how he turns a screening into a show. Before we settled in for Lucretia Marcel’s blood-tinged class satire (Emerald Fennell, sit down), this stunning Dolby Stereo snipe was dropped in. A genuine jaw-dropper from cinema nostalgia goldmine FT Depot, this reminds you that we can do a lot better than Nicole Kidman when it comes to selling the movies…
James Calver, Projects & Events Officer
Favourite films of 2023, as seen through Planet Earth III
Rather than present my ‘Best of’ blog in a traditional list format, I’ve decided to make things more convoluted than they need to be this year and categorise my favourite films of the year according to the episode titles of my favourite TV series of the year: Planet Earth III. Some of the links are a touch extraneous, and some are painfully literal.
Coasts – Talk to Me
I rarely have this much fun in the cinema with a horror film, considering I’m usually a bit of a wimp when it comes to the genre, but I absolutely loved this. It’s exciting to see more and more millennial filmmakers finally getting their chance.
Ocean – How to Have Sex
The type of film that I hope will be shown in classrooms for years to come, and a testament to why we need to keep funding filmmakers such as Molly Manning-Walker. It’s a setting we’ve seen dozens of times before, but never told from this perspective, and that’s what makes the film so important. It also features some of the greatest dad jokes ever exhibited in cinema.
Deserts & Grasslands – Scrapper
Considering I grew up down the road from where this was made, I’m not surprised I loved it. There’s a childlike boundless energy to Scrapper which makes the film so heartwarming.
It’s a quintessentially British depiction of grief — full of hilarious set-pieces, improv dances and magical realism, all occasionally interrupted by a slowly approaching reality. The scene with Georgie and her dad doing impressions on a station platform remains one of the funniest scenes of the year for me.
Freshwater – Barbie
It’s one of my cinema highlights of the year. It’s been a long time since I walked into a cinema on a Monday evening to a packed house, with every single person in the room having the time of their lives. In a year of fairly bleak films, Barbie was a pink beacon of joy in the summer.
(Barbie is linked to Freshwater after a conversation in the office, where my colleague Amy correctly stated: ‘The water between Barbie Land and the real world has to be freshwater otherwise her hair would get frizzy’)
Forests – Pamfir
Felt like a Ukrainian version of Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, if you replace the petty thievery with drug-running and Eastern European gangsters. A lot is going on in Pamfir, but all the elements are neatly tied together by feature debut director Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk. What stood out the most to me was the fiery energy that seemed to burn throughout the film and was present even in the most intimate of moments. Even though we hardly ever leave the central village it feels like an odyssey and the dive into Ukrainian folklore only helps uplift that.
Extremes – Past Lives
Extreme love. Extreme heartbreak. Extreme joy. Extreme sorrow. Extreme talent. An extreme amount of tears.
It was probably my favourite of the year, I have nothing but sheer admiration.
Human – Bread and Salt
I’m cheating a bit as Bread & Salt didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK (though it did screen during BFI Flare), but that’s exactly why I wanted to include it here. I was lucky enough to catch this at New Horizons Film Festival this summer and it’s up there with the most assured debuts of the year.
What starts as a story about a young man visiting home during a break from university quickly becomes an allegory for the impact a generation of missing fathers has had on their community. It becomes a bit heavy-handed towards the final act, but the stunning debut performances carry this one over the line.
Heroes – Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Not sure what it says about me that this was my most rewatched 2023 release, but I couldn’t stop laughing throughout. The influence that Spider-Verse has had on animation is on clear display but where that film took a few beats to expand on the prequel, Puss in Boots took no time at all and was easily my family film of the year.
Selina Robertson, Senior Film Programmer
Favourite cinema screenings of 2023
Regrouping + Audience curated by The Machine That Kills Bad People at the ICA
Two of my favourite filmmakers Lizzie Borden and Barbara Hammer in a double bill screening! Lizzie came to London to present a new digital restoration of her incendiary film Regrouping (1976), a shapeshifting documentary that chronicles the unravelling of a feminist collective, not seen in cinemas for forty years. Lizzie’s inquisitiveness and openness to listen to the ICA audience about what we think her film might be about, because she still doesn’t know, left me feeling uplifted and refreshed, knowing that 1970s and 1980s queer feminist cinema, which includes Audience (1982), has the capacity to enthral, unsettle, question and conjure new queer feminist worlds.
How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish at Barbican + ScreenTalk with Mania Akbari, hosted by Maria Paradinas
London-born, Iranian writer/filmmaker Mania Akbari’s latest essay film is an epic feminist archaeological dig in the pre-revolutionary Iranian film archive, a political intervention that centres images of women, and finds and places women in Iranian film history. ‘I’m not making a film, I’m gazing into your gaze’ Akbari says in voiceover, and with that she reclaims her own body from breast cancer by filming herself being tattooed.
Drawing together clips from nearly 70 Iranian films from the silent era to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, including the film title which is taken from a line berating a female character who has acting ambitions, the film is an astonishing portrait of female agency in Iranian cinema and a feminist fightback against Iran’s patriarchal theocracy. Whilst Iranian filmmaker and curator Ehsan Khoshbakht continues to mine the contours of Iranian cinema by re-centring cinephilia as a political weapon, Mania Akbari demands more, by re-connecting a feminist cinephilia with a critical engagement with the world that draws on the feminist grassroots in Iran. The screening, the discussion and reflections were passionate and political, particularly from the Iranian diaspora who filled the Barbican cinema. Together we witnessed, remembered and drew on the strength of historical feminist activism in Iran, reignited again in 2023 through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg at the London Film Festival
Catching Fire was one of the most moving and revelatory documentaries I saw this year. Anita Pallenberg’s mythology remains large. Known as the unofficial sixth Rolling Stone, ‘It Girl’, the heroin addict who lost so much, the fashion icon who inspired Kate Moss: in this film we finally hear from Anita in her words, narrating her own story based on her unpublished memoirs, superbly voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
In correspondence with Elizabeth Winder’s gossipy book Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Biance Jagger, Anita Pallenberg which spotlights the influence of Pallenberg et al. on the Stones and how these women transformed the group into international rockstars. Similarly, Catching Fire re-frames the story from the inside through Pallenberg’s astonishing, unique life. Highlights include watching Super 8 footage of a trip that Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards and Anita took to Brazil in the early 70s, initially travelling on a large commercial boat. ‘We had great outfits to wander up and down the deck and shock the crew’, Anita says, through Scarlett. Also, touching to hear the interviews with Anita’s children Marlon and Angela, as well as Kate Moss’ moving account of meeting Anita for the first time in the 90s. The filmmakers Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill have done a great job piecing together the archive, never over-sensationalising, finding the light and dark forces that emanated out of Anita. ‘I’ve been called a witch, a slut, a murderer’ she writes. Finally, we see and know a different Anita, independent from the Stones: an artist, an intellectual, a sartorial wit, a woman (as she says in the film) who always had her own power.
Sami Abdul-Razzak, Marketing Officer
A favourite film from the past, present and (?) future
One from the past: Il Posto (1961)
Having only a dim recollection of watching Ermmano Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs on a sleepy Sunday afternoon several years ago (which amounted to it being a rather long observation of rural Italian life from sometime in the past), I entered this screening at Close Up Film Centre (one of London’s brightest bastions of repertory cinema) prepared for another challenging piece of classic cinema. To my surprise, I was instead met with a charming, funny and short (!) story of a young man who falls head-over-heels for a young woman he meets while they are both interviewing for jobs at a large corporation in the big city.
Following the interview (which includes a series of quite bizarre tests, such as an hour-long examination to complete a single, simple mathematical sum, and questions like ‘Does the future seem hopeless to you?’), both of them get positions at the company — and young Domenico spends the rest of the film trying to simply find Antonietta once again, while at the same time being introduced to the mundanity of his future adult life as a small cog in a huge, faceless machine. The screening was one of those lovely, rare moments when you go into something with little in the way of expectations, and all of a sudden realise you’re watching one of your new favourite films.
One from the present: The Plains
Having just glibly dismissed one of the archetypal works of slow cinema in my section above, it may seem curious that I’ve selected a 3-hour-long film that takes place almost entirely in the back seat of a car as my favourite film of 2023. And when I first read about The Plains, while intrigued, I too was sceptical about how a film about a man commuting home from work in rush hour traffic (surely one of the most tedious parts of modern life) could succeed. However, I’m pleased to report that (somehow!) it does.
Taking place over several days, we join Andrew (a middle-aged man working in a legal firm of some sort) every day at 5pm as he leaves the office, and then watch as he drives along the same, very busy, very slow, highways of Melbourne on his way home. Often he is alone, and we listen to his phone calls with his wife or his ailing mother, and sometimes he gives a lift to his younger colleague, David (played by director David Easteal). Through these conversations we gain insights into both of their lives, hearing about their struggles, hopes, past experiences and differing ideas. Despite watching it at home and my mind sadly becoming increasingly addled by the many attention-degrading facets of the internet, I soon found myself settling into the film’s contemplative rhythm — feeling soothed by the steady & increasingly familiar scenes of the Melbourne cityscape, and reflecting on my own life as they did theirs.
The Plains is available to stream on MUBI.
One from the future (?): Riceboy Sleeps
Last but not least, I wanted to highlight a film that as of yet doesn’t have a UK distributor, but I heartily hope will do in the future. The opening film at this year’s London Migration Film Festival, Riceboy Sleeps (which is based in part on director Anthony Shim’s own childhood) tells the story of a Korean single mother, So-Young, as she raises son Dong-Hyun after they move to Canada to begin again.
We see Dong-Hyun first a child entering school, and then later as a rather moody teenager, whilst his mum navigates a new culture and way of life for the both of them. While it occasionally walks along some of the more well-trodden paths from the ‘coming of age in a new place’ playbook, it’s a beautiful, tender, often funny and impressively crafted film that culminates in one of the most moving scenes I’ve experienced in a long time — one which left me and the rest of the sold-out crowd with wet cheeks.
Header image: Past Lives (dir. Celine Song, 2023), image courtesy of STUDIOCANAL