Ep. 338: Jessica Kiang on Locarno 2025: The Best of the Postwar British Retrospective + Becoming

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’m reporting from the Locarno film festival, which every year has an outstanding retrospective that’s a parallel essential to the premieres of new films. To discuss this year’s retro, a deftly curated tribute to British postwar cinema called Great Expectations, I’m joined by a regular guest, critic and programmer Jessica Kiang, who is filing reviews for Variety but also, like me, inhaling swathes of this retrospective.

Titles discussed include Obsession (1949, Edward Dmytryk), The Yellow Balloon (1953, J. Lee Thompson), It Always Rains on Sundays (1947, Robert Hamer), Turn the Key Softly (1953, Jack Lee), To Be a Woman (1951, Jill Craigie), The Elephant Never Forgets (1953, John Krish), Train of Events (1949, Sidney Cole, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden), Passport to Pimlico (1949, Henry Cornelius), The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950, Frank Launder), Time Without Pity (1957, Joseph Losey), and Never Let Go (1960, John Guillermin). Plus, just because: a bonus, brand-new film from Kazakhstan, Becoming (Zhannat Alshanova).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass