British Film Festival 2021

Presented by Palace Cinemas in association with Luna Palace Cinemas, the British Film Festival’s full programme has been revealed, celebrating the best of British in a remarkable line up of 31 films, a number of which are screening for the first time in Australia. Excellent performances from Festival favourites and brilliant newcomers will delight audiences and ignite their senses in a line up which includes the best contemporary cinema, documentaries and the chance to experience some of the most significant British films of the 1970s on the big screen.

The Festival opens with the highly anticipated Australian Premiere of THE DUKE (pictured, above), a heart-warming tale based on a 1961 true story of 60-year-old taxi driver Kempton Bunton who steals Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, featuring beautiful performances from Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren. Kenneth Branagh has written and directs BELFAST, a personal eulogy to his hometown. Starring Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench, the film is a poignant story of love, laughter and loss in one boy’s childhood, set amidst the music and social turmoil of the late 1960s Northern Ireland.

Edgar Wright’s psychological horror fantasy LAST NIGHT IN SOHO starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie, follows an aspiring fashion designer who is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters a dazzling wannabe singer. The director has issued a message for patrons, urging them not to divulge the plot so as not to spoil it for others. For music lovers ERIC CLAPTON: LOCKDOWN SESSIONS, is an intimately staged concert film from Clapton and his band, following the recording of a new live album, featuring acoustic renditions of past hits, and filmed in the English countryside during the pandemic. And for Bowie fans, the  biopic STARDUST follows a young David Bowie, played by Johnny Flynn, on a 1971 road trip across America when he was developing his Ziggy Stardust persona.