What’s coming soon to BFI Player in June 2021?
David Farnor | On 04, Jun 2021
BFI Player, the BFI’s streaming platform, is a gateway to global film, offering a collection of arthouse and world cinema to subscribers, alongside its pay-per-view rental releases and free archive titles and silent movie shorts.
This month has a wealth of international gems in store, from a double-bill of Agnes Varda to a Kelly Reichardt classic plus the modern masterpiece that is Zama.
Here’s what’s coming to BFI Player’s subscription service in June 2021:
Cleo from 5 to 7 – 1st June
Agnes Varda’s classic character study follows a successful pop singer as she wanders around Paris while awaiting the results of serious medical tests.
Vagabond – 1st June
Agnes Varda tells the story of Mona, a young hitchhiker who cannot communicate with the world. Her tale unfolds in flashback by people who came into contact with her, after she is found frozen to death.
Western – 7th June
Masculine tensions reach boiling point in Valeska Grisebach’s sizzling neo-western, where migrant German construction workers are pitched against villagers in remotest Bulgaria.
Meek’s Cutoff – 10th June
Kelly Reichardt takes us back to 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other’s instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy.
Zama – 14th June
In her first feature since 2008’s The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel creates a memorable exploration of personal malaise. Adapting Antonio Di Benedetto’s existential novel, it follows Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a minor officer in an unnamed colony of the 18th-century Spanish crown, desperate to return to his family. As his request is repeatedly delayed by red tape, Martel charts his progressive decline with opulent visuals and a multi-layered soundscape.
Summer 1993 – 14th June
Frida (Laia Artigas) is dealing with a grief she cannot process when she is packed off from her Barcelona home to live with her mother’s brother, his wife and their four-year old daughter in rural Catalonia. However, good intentions don’t always produce the desired result as Frida struggles to settle into a new family dynamic.
Kansas City – 18th June
Rooted partly in Robert Altman’s recollections of his childhood, this brings together the staging of a 1930s jamming contest between Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and the various unfortunate consequences of the kidnapping of a local politician’s wife. The evocation of the untamed city’s speakeasies, gangsters, corrupt politicians and jazz clubs is memorably vivid, the acting terrific, the music – played by top jazzers – superb.
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