MOSTLY BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL 18 (2026)—PREVIEW

Ah, how time flies. I can recall when Ruthe Stein’s Mostly British Film Festival was nothing more than a wee tyke. The festival has all grown up now and turned into a proper little adult as it blooms into its 18th edition at San Francisco’s Vogue Theater (February 5-12, 2026) with an array of award-winning movies from the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India. Further, the festival has entered into a prestigious partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), which has provided the program with three films that BFI helped complete. 

Opening night for Mostly British commemorates the life and talent of Richard Burton with a double bill comprised of a revival screening of Tony Richardson’s Look Back In Anger (1959) coupled with an advance screening of Marc Evans’ Mr. Burton (2025), the revelatory British biopic about the early life of Welsh actor Richard Burton and his relationship with his insinuated gay mentor Philip Burton. Harry Lawtey convincingly channels the commanding sensuality of the impoverished young Richard Jenkins, who under the tutelage of his high school teacher Mr. Burton (in a compassionately restrained performance by Toby Jones), discovers his considerable acting talent under Mr. Burton’s guidance, with his career insured and furthered by being adopted and supplied with Mr. Burton’s last name. Second fathers rarely achieve such a vital role in releasing the potential of their adopted sons. As value added, Kate Burton will reminisce on the Vogue stage about life with her famous father and what it was like to be parented by Elizabeth Taylor.

  

Producer, director, actor, fashion designer and author Sadie Frost brought her first directorial feature-length documentary Quant (2021) to Mostly British editions back and now returns with Twiggy (2024), likewise screening on the festival’s opening day. In London’s “swinging sixties” Twiggy, aka Dame Lesley Lawson (née Hornby), burst onto the scene at 16 as the waifish androgynous model with the Raggedy Ann eyes. She was the first model that I ever knew by name and for a while she seemed to be everywhere (here in the United States at least due to the marketing prescience of Diana Vreeland). But after she retired from her modeling career, I lost track of her and so it has been illuminating to see how she carried on over the decades, successfully amplifying her persona into movies, Broadway, the recording industry and subsequent fashion and modeling endeavors. Her more recent appearances in Frost’s documentary, as well as in the soon-to-be-distributed Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (2025), reveals a seasoned personage comfortable in her own fame and fascinating in her familiarity. 

Frost, whose father David Vaughan was a psychedelic artist who did work for the Beatles in the 1960s, has an experiential grasp of the era that revolutionized my generation, bringing it all to the foreground with entertaining dexterity and a heady ensemble of talking heads: Paul McCartney, Lulu, Dustin Hoffman, Joanna Lumley, Brooke Shields, Tommy Tune, Ken Russell, and on and on.

   

The History of Sound 2025) directed by Oliver Hermanus and starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor (“two of the hottest young actors across the pond”) is, arguably, one of my favorite films, if not my favorite, from the last year and I was crestfallen that it didn’t receive a single Oscar® nomination, not only for its heartfelt performances but its stellar score. This haunting ode to synesthesia wounded my heart with its regretful practices of longing and unfulfilled desires and is not to be missed at the festival for fear of your own regrets. It offers the story of two young men, a musical prodigy (Mescal) and a musicologist (O’Connor) whose mutual love for the folk songs of New England and their efforts to record them for posterity provide a temporal overlap that gives shape to their physical intimacy. Which is to say that sound provides form. In this incandescent film memory is shaped by sound.

  

Both My Father’s Shadow (2025) and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024) are children-in-peril narratives situated in Africa during the political tumult of the Nigerian 1993 presidential election and war-torn Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1980. Perhaps, because of the severity of the atrocities at play, both films lean into magical realism through the point of view of children victimized by external circumstances they can’t fully comprehend. 

Akinola Davies Jr.’s feature length film debut My Father’s Shadow, co-written by his brother Wale Davies, stars Sope Dirisu as Folarin, the father whose frequent absence has elevated him into a mythic stature by his two sons Aki and Remi. Joining him on a day trip into the city of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria, the two boys are forced to inadvertently confront the dark secrets their father harbors; both his involvement with a woman other than their mother, and revolutionary activities that presage his ultimate absence. The film had its world premiere at the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Nigerian film to be selected for the festival's Official Selection. It won the Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or. Critically acclaimed, My Father’s Shadow received numerous awards and nominations, including a British Independent Film Award and two Gotham Independent Film Awards. It was also selected as the UK's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, though it did not make the final shortlist.

  

Embeth Davidtz’s feature directorial debut Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is seen through the eyes of eight-year-old Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller (in a remarkably embodied and feral performance by Lexi Venter) and is based on Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War. 

"Don't let's go to the dogs tonight" is an idiom meaning "let's not ruin our evening" or "let's not let things fall apart," often implying the avoidance of rowdy, messy, or excessive behavior. It originates from a poem by A.P. Herbert which describes avoiding a night out for fear of encountering older, rowdy people ("mother will be there") and is commonly used as the title for Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, suggesting a chaotic, dysfunctional, or deteriorating situation, often in the context of partying or personal decline. Not only does this incriminate Bobo’s mother, Nicola Fuller (Davidtz adds her acting chops to the project), whose sketchy alcoholic behavior signals a psychological doom spiral, but likewise reflects the chaotic, unsettled, and often desperate life of Bobo’s white family in ‘80s Rhodesia, highlighting themes of dysfunction, political instability, and the decline of colonial life. It bravely tackles the difficult subject of how colonial practices of racism are learned. As value added to the festival, Embeth Davidtz will be Zoom interviewed before the screening. And as an aside, for those unable to attend the festival, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight has been recently added to stream at Netflix.

  

As a so-called “gay” man watching so-called “gay” narratives, I frequently wonder how much cultural subtext and subcultural humor is truly being appreciated by so-called “straight” audiences? For example, Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers (2025) centers a middle-aged man in an exasperated scenario caring for four elderly women. Even before the AIDS pandemic anointed gay men with the near-archetypal role of caregiver, gender-variant individuals in multiple cultures throughout the world and over time have traditionally been assigned the onerous tasks of caring for the sick and tending to the dead. That’s a historical fact most folks might be completely unaware of and have little concern about, but that’s where queer humor—specifically, queer gallows humor—can win over even the coldest of hearts, eliciting compassion for such burdensome responsibilities.  

Four Mothers’ script, co-written by Darren and Colin Thornton with Gianni Di Gregorio, deftly lets audiences in on all the gay jokes while opening the story out into a wide-eyed observation of mother-son relations and the dangers of forgetting to care for oneself while caring for others. A script, however, even as clever a script as this one, is only as good as its performances and this ensemble—headed by the ever-delightful Fionnula Flanagan—effectively mines every laugh and every insight without much to-do. You won’t know whether to cry with exhaustion or laugh with relief, but the filmmakers have insured you’ll combine the two.

  

You never know which pub Willy the Shake will haul himself up to for a pint. It happens to be Kenny’s Bar in Paul Kennedy’s Dead Man’s Money (2024), his droll and lilting reimagining of Shakespeare’s MacBeth where Young Henry (Ciarán McMenamin) and his wife Pauline (Judith Roddy) become concerned that Old Henry will write them out of his will and hand their inheritance over to his new lady friend the Widow Tweed. Worried that they’re not going to get what’s coming to them, Young Henry and Pauline—ignoring the pricking in their thumbs—get far more than they bargained for in this dark hard-hearted comedy of errors.  

Harris Dickinson’s swoonworthy performances in The Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Babygirl (2024) didn’t prepare me for his confident and credible feature film directorial debut Urchin (2025), which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won him the FIPRESCI Prize and Frank Dillane the section’s Best Actor Award for his portrayal of Mike, a young homeless man struggling with poverty and drug addiction. With unflinching observation coupled with keen compassion, Dickinson ushers in a new generation of British realism, taking viewers into a world from which they would customarily look away. In an interview with Dazed magazine, Dickinson has described Urchin (originally entitled Dream Space) as being about mental health and "people who fall between the cracks" and "the ways in which the system fails people in certain ways.” 

Frank Dillane, who I know from the television series Fear the Walking Dead (where he plays Nick Clark, a similarly deadbeat character recovering from drug addiction) strengthens what could hazardously become type-casting with a fierce quality of wanting to overcome the thrall of recidivism, opening our hearts to how difficult it truly is to overcome shadows in a world where you’ve been cast away and denied entrance to normality.

  

Mostly British closes with I Swear (2025), which tells the true story of John Davidson who has Tourette syndrome but doesn't know it. In fact no one in his small Scottish hometown of Galashiels knows it or is even aware of it as a medical condition—they deem him rude and ripe for the nuthouse—until after being interviewed at the age of 16 for the 1989 BBC documentary series Q.E.D. (John’s Not Mad), then again at age 30 for The Boy Can't Help It (2002), and yet again at 37 for Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It (2009), his activism on behalf of those with Tourettes kicks into high gear. The BBC describes him as “a nationally known ambassador for the condition." 

Robert Aramayo won Best Lead Performance at the British Independent Film Awards for his perfectly-pitched portrayal of Davidson, learning how to become independent in the world and then advocating for the independence and acceptance of others. En route is perhaps one of the most ribald and hilarious meet-cutes I’ve ever seen on-screen when John meets a young woman with Tourettes for the first time.