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If you’re rolling into Locarno Film Festival’s 78th edition this August, and you’re already tired of the usual indie fare served up year after year, here’s a little secret: the festival’s retrospective section is like a cinema time machine with a gourmet twist. This year, it’s dishing out “Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960,” a buffet of 45 films featuring everything from gritty crime flicks like Hell Is a City to the cheeky humor of I’m All Right, Jack, and the delightful Whisky Galore! Now, I can’t help but wonder—maybe Venus hanging out in Leo has a hand in this nostalgic celebration of British cinema’s postwar soul? Because nothing says drama and flair quite like those foggy London streets and wartime scars etched into celluloid. Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, with the BFI National Archive and Cinémathèque Suisse backing him up, brings these classics and hidden gems back from the vault. It’s not just a film fest—it’s a cultural mirror reflecting a nation wrestling with identity, modesty, and a whole lot of post-imperial blues. So, if you’re curious about how a country’s ruins, children, and trauma made it to the silver screen, and why certain genres got the cold shoulder, this retrospective’s got you covered. Fancy diving into cinematic history with a side of astrological wonder? LEARN MORE
If you attend the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, running Aug. 6-16, and you’re looking from something more than the latest art-house discoveries the fest will screen, keep in mind that there is always its popular retrospective that tends to present a buffet of classics and hidden gems. This year, those hoping for a chance to dive into cinematic history can feast their eyes and ears on “Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960.”
The menu of 45 films, with such titles as Hell Is a City, I’m All Right, Jack, and Whisky Galore!, was put together in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of StudioCanal and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The program promises “a tribute” to British cinema from that period that paints “a rich and diverse picture of life in the postwar years as reflected in British popular cinema.”
As such, audiences can see “everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger (themselves the subject of a major Locarno retrospective in 1982 and BFI retrospective in 2023) to unheralded genre gems by lesser-known craftsmen like Seth Holt or Lance Comfort, the program celebrates British studio filmmakers from 1945 to 1960, when a new wave washed up on Britain’s shores.”
THR caught up with Khoshbakht to talk about his latest Locarno retrospective, the joys and challenges of a curator and what he learned about British films after the war.
Can you share a little bit about how you came up with this year’s retrospective theme and why this period of filmmaking interested you?
Whatever subject I pick for a program is very organic. It’s a long, steady process of just being fascinated by certain types of films, and all of a sudden, you put them together. And very often, you put them together with the help of film literature — you realize there’s a connection, there’s a meaning to it. I grew up on British films on television, so British films were an integral part of my upbringing. They were part of my cinematic education. So, to me, many of these directors were names that were worthy of being taken very seriously, but then I realized I was part of a minority of people considering them significant directors. Of course, I’m not talking about David Lean or Carol Reed, but there were many other directors that I was fascinated with who I realized were not even known in the U.K. outside of a very small circle of very hardcore cinephiles.
‘Whisky Galore!’
Courtesy of StudioCanal Films
Actually, to this day, I believe British cinema and British studio films remain among the least known national cinemas in Western Europe. We know a great deal about French films. We know a great deal about Italian films. We even know a great deal about all sorts of rubbish films because of an obsession with Italian genre films or with French genre films. But unfortunately, this does not apply to British films, and I tried to make a program that would delve into that lesser-known side of British cinema, but at the same time bring out all the big names and films that are great enough to be revisited anytime.
When I moved from New York to London, I was fascinated by how, in America, everyone seems comfortable promoting themselves, while in Britain, you can have somebody who has won all sorts of awards and accolades but still be very quiet and modest about it. Could a certain kind of over-modesty in British culture contribute to this trend you mentioned?
Good question! Yes and no. In terms of the industrial side, no, because they were actually desperate to have these films exported. You look at, especially British B-movies, very often they have two English titles, and the other title is, of course, the American title, because there was always some deal going on with smaller American studios to distribute these films in America. So, big companies or even small ones in the British film industry wanted that exposure.
But in terms of within the borders of the country, I think so. I think it’s actually a bit more problematic than that, because the characteristic that you just described sounded like something very positive and very normal. Whereas I think when it comes to British films, we are mostly dealing with some sort of inferiority complex, as opposed to Americans, as opposed to the French. For instance, British popular cinema was systematically attacked and destroyed by British film critics. This is a phenomenon that is very rare, very unusual in other Western European countries. The reason was that these films were rejected on the basis of a lack of good taste. This quest for good taste, which is also something very British, is very negative, in my opinion, because who defines what good taste is?
‘Hell Is a City’
Courtesy of Hammer Film Holdings Limited
This idea of good taste is a limiting framework and totally subjective. And it led to the dismissal of a great number of these films. It’s hard to believe today that when a film like Brighton Rock came out in 1948, it was dismissed as a film that shows the poor taste of its makers. And the problem was that these films were made by a country that had won a war, but then all of a sudden was left with nothing, bankrupt and with an identity crisis, not just the postwar identity crisis — that the collective experience of the war all of a sudden becomes the individualistic capitalism of the postwar period — but also the question of: Who are we after the end of the British Empire and all these things.
It is that sense of despair, I would say, that you see in British films of that period. And that’s exactly what makes the British films so great, something that was not dealt with in a direct manner. That’s why they were dismissed, because critics couldn’t look at these films and see so much pity, crime and gloom. When you look at these films, you understand that it was not a very happy place. But the credit I give to British cinema is that, both more art-house-oriented films and also outright popular films, have a very good understanding of British society. That’s why I think this program in Locarno will serve as some sort of a cultural mirror. You can read a lot from these films about the British character, including the modesty that you mentioned. These things come to the foreground in British films, especially the selection I have made, because my aim was to see life in Britain through the films.
Is that why certain genres are not represented?
Yes, that’s why I didn’t include fantastical films. That was a natural editing lens, so to speak. I thought, let’s focus on people and how they lived. This doesn’t mean that a film like The Curse of Frankenstein doesn’t say anything about Britain. In fact, it does. But I wanted a more direct exchange and interplay between the realities in Britain, the lives of ordinary people and the films. That’s why the fantastical films are not there.
Ehsan Khoshbakht
Courtesy of Margherita Caprilli
Also, The Third Man is not there, because it’s set in Vienna, not in Britain, which, again, is a different experience. I also had a third criterion: I excluded period pieces. So all films in the program are also set between September 1945, the end of the war, and the end of 1960. They are contemporary films about contemporary issues set in Britain.
Did you pick up on any overarching or underlying themes when you selected the films?
Many. One that is very appealing to me, maybe because of my background in architecture and urban design, is the whole idea of how films are tied to the cities. They are very site-specific. You get two types of different approaches to cities: One is ruined cities. So you see many films set in bombed sites of, say, East London or other cities and towns in the U.K. The role that ruins play, figuratively, metaphorically, is really important. I can give you an example. There is a film in the program called Obsession. It’s about a doctor who wants to kill his wife’s lover, so he goes to this bombed-out building every day, secretly smuggles out small doses of acid from his surgery, and puts the acid into a bathtub, waiting for that day when the bathtub is full to dissolve the body of his wife’s lover in the bathtub.
So, in British cinema, the ruins and the bomb sites and what is left of buildings have become like a projection of the subconscious of these people. British cinema uses that concept to perfection. And you could argue that there is a sort of sub-genre in British cinema about children in those settings. You see many great classics of British cinema centered around children and set in bomb sites. A great example is a film called Hunted from 1952, directed by Charles Crichton. That film won the best film prize at the Locarno Film Festival in 1953, so we are playing this film again after 72 years, because it is perhaps the best of those films that show how children try to survive in the post-war landscape. The question of children is another major theme of this retrospective.
Do you have any other film examples you could highlight, either about children or otherwise?
The retrospective will open with a film called A Diary for Timothy by Humphrey Jennings. It’s from 1945 and actually set during the last days of the war, but there’s no shot of the war shown in the film. It’s just on the soundtrack. A baby is born, his name is Timothy, and the film poses the question: What is going to happen to this child? What kind of future can we build for him?
‘Peeping Tom’
Michael Powell (Theatre) Ltd., Courtesy of StudioCanal
This film opens the retrospective, and then we follow different children who grow up towards the end of the ’50s, become sort of teenagers or young adults, and examine questions in the context of British films. The other question that these films deal with in terms of children is how much of the psychological trauma of the war would be appearing in different forms in the lives of these children when they grow up. So the question of trauma is another major theme of these films, which has been explored in many, many different titles.
The last film in the program is Peeping Tom, a film from 1960 that deals with childhood trauma, because the [protagonist] is a young filmmaker who, as a child, was abused by his father. And who plays the father? The director himself, Michael Powell, so it’s a film that sort of closes the circle.
Is there any aspect of film curation that we haven’t discussed yet that you would like to highlight?
It’s not always straightforward. Part of the work of a curator is also knowing the material that she or he is going to show to the public, the very physical side of it. This retrospective features many 35-millimeter film prints.
For example, is a print of the film available and where? In the case of one film I looked at for this retrospective, the print that the BFI has is not screenable. It’s just so poor that you cannot show it anymore. So the search to get a print of that film itself took God knows how many weeks.
The film is called The Clouded Yellow, directed by Ralph Thomas, the father of Jeremy Thomas, the famous producer. I love that picture. Eventually, we found a version which was an Irish print of the film, because it had the title card at the beginning in Irish, but the film is in English.
‘I’m All Right, Jack’
Courtesy of Charter Film Productions Ltd
We realized that actually, that film was shorter. Now you ask yourself why. And a whole comparison discovered that at some point they had changed the cut because they wanted to hide or make it difficult for people to guess the true identity of a murderer in the film, because in the long version, it’s easier to guess from almost very early on. But by removing two or three scenes, It becomes more difficult. They wanted to maintain that element of surprise.
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