Author: The Reviews Hub - Film

Writer: Alice Douard and Laurette Polmanss Director: Alice Douard There is a touch of Nora Ephron in Alice Douard’s charming comedic drama Love Letters, particularly in its blend of warmth and wry observation. The film follows a bohemian, middle-class lesbian couple—DJ and sound technician Céline (Ella Rumpf) and dentist Nadia (Monia Chokri)—as they navigate the messy path to parenthood. Set in 2014, it opens against a bold red backdrop, underscored by archival audio from the 2013 French National Assembly vote that passed the “Taubira Law” legalising same-sex marriage. While this introduction suggests a weightier drama, Douard instead adopts a light,…

Writer and Director: Alex Burunova Satisfaction may be the most traumatic film screening at this year’s BFI Flare. Its striking colour palette of whites and dusty blues hides a dark secret at the heart of the relationship between two composers working on their new album on a Greek island.  Lola and Philip get little work done, and their love affair is reaching its end. It begins with Lola (an imposing, unyielding Emma Laird) refusing to eat the breakfast that Philip has brought her in bed. She looks sick, fatigued. However, she perks up when she later goes alone to the…

Writers: Julian Lautenbacher, Nadiia Khatymlianska and Sasha Ongley Director: Julian Lautenbacher Irving Berlin recognised that when there is any hint of trouble ahead, the only thing to do is dance, and Julian Lautenbacher’s new film, co-written with Nadiia Khatymlianska and Sasha Ongley premiering at BFI Flare 2026, puts that advice into practice as Ukrainian dancers Jay and Vol’demar, a couple, use dance as their own act of resistance. This 90-minute documentary filmed between 2022 and late 2025 blends lots of ideas and storytelling styles, themes and narrative strands that sometimes make its purpose – beyond celebrating artistic liberty – hard…

Writer and Director: Lucio Castro Drunken Noodles is another distinctive, playful turn from Argentine auteur Lucio Castro, following his breakout End of the Century. While his debut bent time into cosmic shapes to reconfigure the gay “meet-cute,” his latest continues this exploration of ephemeral connection as a non-linear odyssey; calling it “magical realism” feels reductive. Castro doesn’t just introduce the fantastical; he destabilises reality itself, dissolving the boundary between the lived and the imagined. It is a film of small, intentional moments where interior and exterior fold into one another—an erotic, entrancing experience stitched together by haunted memory logic. Castro…

Writers: Arjun Talwar and Bigna Tomschin Director: Arjun Talwar   This thoughtful documentary sees a foreigner living in Poland chart the history of the street on which he lives while gesturing towards the future of the country. Hailing from India, Arjun Talwar has lived on the 1km-long Wolf Street in Warsaw for over a decade, but it’s only after Covid that he decides to film the people who live on his road. Before, he would see people from his balcony, but now he wants to find out more about them and the old-fashioned neighbourhood in which he lives, its walls…

Writers: Lexie Bean, Isidore Bethel and Miles Hill Director: Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos “All we can expect from visibility is hate” states one contributor to Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos’ documentary What Will I Become, sensitively exploring the topic of suicide among transmasculine youth. Showing at the BFI Flare Festival 2026, this 90-minute documentary is made with care, telling the story of two trans men in America – Blake Brockington and Kyler Prescott – whose lives are celebrated by friends and family, hopefully exploring the ways in which they influenced and inspired others, while simultaneously recognising the lack of…

Writers: Issy Brett, Carys Glynne and Isabel Daly  Director: Isabel Daly Receiving its world premiere at this year’s BFI Flare Film Festival is Isabel Daly’s quirky Cornish drama about a woman who falls in love with a selkie, a mythical creature that shapeshifts between a seal and a human. Selkies are never meant to wash up on the same shore twice, but for artist Morwenna, recently split up with her girlfriend, the same selkie keeps returning. However, as much as this is a love story and an examination of the grief experienced after the end of a love affair, Washed…

Writers: Jaume Claret Muxart and Meritxell Colell Director: Jaume Claret Muxart 27-year-old Spanish director Jaume Claret Muxart has an old soul. His brooding coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old Spanish boy on a family cycling holiday in Germany feels steeped in the past despite being set in the present, and the close-ups of the lead actor’s face appear to pay homage to Bergman: and all is handsomely shot on 16mm. Dídac’s parents don’t have enough money for a fancy holiday, and with his mother soon to appear in The Death of Empedocles back in a Spanish theatre, they have decided to…