Six Radical Discoveries from the 2026 BFI London Film Festival

Queer Edward II
Theo Rollason

It’s ajubilant homecoming for London-based director Theo Rollason, who scooped up the Queer Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival for their behind-the-scenes documentary covering the fraught production of Derek Jarman’sEdward II. Using Seamus McGarvey’s never-before-seen archive of betacam footage, Rollason builds an evocative capsule of 1990’s queer activism extending out from the political rife surrounding the production unit, featuring cameos from an emerging Tilda Swinton, Annie Lennox, and the unforgettable Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. At once hilarious, insightful, galvanising and tragic, Rollason lovingly restores the spirit of Jarman in all his brazen liveliness. As with any activist film, it offers not simply awindow into the process of one of British history’s greatest artists, but also the timely reminder that there is still much work to bedone.

Revolutionaries Never Die
Mohanad Yaqubi

Another retreat into post-legacy directors, and within the landscape of the 1970s, filmmaker Yohanad Yaqubi eulogises the work of radical documentarian Jocelyn Saab, using the framework of their 2018 email correspondences as well as 115 reels of unedited analogue footage. Portraying the impact of war on domestic territory across Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran, Yaqubi’s voiceover alludes to how film can distance us from subject, but offers an invitation to analyse also. Moments of immersion and reflection prove sparse in the dominating address of contemporary media. However, Saab’s footage doesn’t linger on the graphic images of Palestine intended as spectacle – rather, her considerations of the Palestinian cause stem from how conflict inhabits habit, ritual and practice. Young children tussle with sticks on the beaches, dreaming of guns and knives; an elderly man walks down adusty street, eerie with silence. Despite its assemblage of inherited reels, Yaqubi’s tribute to aformative voice of militant cinema is perhaps the most pressing and contemporary work from London’s 2026 festival slate.

Masao Adachi Takes aPassport Photo
Kamal Aljafari

One for the fans of Japanese New Wave, prolificpinku director and left-wing radical Masao Adachi (Female Student Guerrilla, Ecstasy of the Angels), goes to have his passport photo taken. At times sweet, softly slapstick and politically enlightening, this 28minute-long short alludes to the afterlife of asuccessful filmmaker. What comes after censorship, retrospective, and revolution? Using normalcy as alens into the life of adisenfranchised artist, Kamil Aljafari’s camera is astoundingly collusive as it lingers on the palpable, shuffling silence of shared encounters. Arejuvenating, humanist fable for acinematic canon and thorny film wave, often wrought by controversy.

At Night
Beatrice Gibson

Another homegrown success, experimental filmmaker Beatrice Gibson returns with accolade from Locarno Film Festival, winning the title of Best Emerging Director earlier this year,At Night, described by Gibson as ​“choral autofiction,” weaves adiaristic tale immersed in synth, and dripping in Parisian hallucinogen under the cover of darkness. Inspired by the literary avant-garde, her attentive tale of women speaking on sex, desire, motherhood and difference, feels structured between echoes of Akerman and the bokeh camerawork of Canada’s Rhayne Vermette. Often strangely drifting between perspectives as essayistic meditation, Gibson’s characters never try to convince you that they’re right – but they articulate difference objectively, like whispers intruded on, overhead amidst the murmurs of alate night bistro.