LONDON, June 08, 2015 — /REAL TIME PRESS RELEASE/ — London On Film is a new major season of films at the BFI Southbank that will explore and celebrate the capital for four months from 1st July to 9th October. This is the first time the BFI has ever celebrated the city in which it is based, and will feature 200 films, a number of which have been unseen since they were first filmed, offering an extraordinary perspective of the city from the past 120 years. The BFI Southbank is the national home of cinema, featuring three state-of-the-art screens in Waterloo on the Southbank.For more on this vital cultural quarter, as well as the latest rates forLondon hotels, seeLondonTown.com.

The London On Film season will include events such as a Soho Weekender (24-26 July) to celebrate the unique culture of Soho captured in films from 1896 – 1985 such as West End Jungle (1961), The Small World of Sammy Lee(1963) and Sunshine in Soho (1956). There will also be a discussion event Vanishing Soho on the state of Soho today in the light of current major changes for those who live and play there. It will include some of the earliest films ever made, such as RW Paul’s Blackfriars Bridge (1896(. Films from major filmmakers include Anthony Asquith’s evocative Underground (1928), the first feature to be shot on the underground and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), which takes us into the dangerous realms of psychedelic and sexual experimentation. There will also be films by Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Winterbottom and Otto Preminger.

Black experience is highlighted in a series of key films including Earl Cameron’s pioneering role as a black sailor in the crime drama Pool of London (1951) with fine use of locations around Tower Bridge, Poplar, Southwark and the City; Cameron also stars in the little seen The Heart Within (1957) another crime thriller set in London’s Docklands. Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959) is a film-maker’s response to the Notting Hill race riots wrapped up in a murder mystery while Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1981) shows the demoralisation of black youth, and offers an eerily prescient portrait of the situation in Deptford which would give rise to the Brixton Riots of the same year. For more information, see LondonTown.com.

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