Ep. 340: Ehsan Khoshbakht on Great Expectations, the British retrospective of Locarno 2025

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’m reporting from the Locarno film festival, where the annual retrospective has once again been quite popular. So I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to speak with the retrospective’s programmer, Ehsan Khoshbakht, who also co-directs Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and also curated Locarno’s 2024 tribute to Columbia Pictures. Khoshbakht explains the basis of the series, providing fascinating insights into what fueled British postwar cinema, crosscurrents with other cinemas, and the thought processes behind film programming.

Among the titles discussed (adding new ones to those already discussed on the podcast): Locarno’s 1952 Golden Leopard winner Hunted (directed by Charles Crichton), It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer), The Woman in Question (Anthony Asquith), as well as a look at the director Jack Lee (Turn the Key Softly).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass