The bold new festival set to screen films everyone else is afraid to

Most festivals aren’t dreamed up while watching Assassin 33 AD Director’s Cut: Black Easter – a critically derided time travel film from 2020 starring Heidi Montag from The Hills – but that’s exactly how a brand new three-day event, set to hit London next month, got its start. “We were kinda like, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if there was a festival that showed something that would be genuinely unprogrammable?” co-organiser Kit Ramsay says. “And that was the beginning,”

From 6 to 9 August, The Final Film Festival will launch with an inaugural line-up of international premieres and rarely screened hidden gems being screened in the city’s best cinemas, ranging from the ICA to The Castle Cinema and the Peckhamplex. Not bad for an idea that spawned less than four months ago. But the dream has been “percolating” for the last decade, with Ramsay and fellow organiser Jack Hewitt long-time regulars on the global festival scene: Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, pop-up cinemas in east London and, of course, the behemoth that is Cannes. For them, this new festival was about offering an alternative option packed with films other organisers would baulk at.

“We're pitching a necessity in London’s feature film circuit – you’ve got London Film Festival, and London Short Film Festival is the city’s home for shorts, but where is something in between?” Hewitt asks. “I think the only one that’s really been able to break any sort of mold is Queer East [which spotlights LGBTQ+ cinema and live arts from East and Southeast Asia]. There are a lot of festivals similar to that, like LAFM [Los Angeles Festival of Movies] and Brunswick Underground Film Festival in Melbourne, that have popped up in recent years. And so the appetite is there. There’s really no London Underground Film Festival – but you can’t call it that because TFL would be on your arse.”

To pitch yourself as an underground film festival, you need the kooky programme to back it up – and they’ve certainly got it. Among its programme are Perfumania, a surreal comedy about a perfumer huffer starring Tim Heidecker, Julia Fox and, of all people, Kevin Kline; A Rimbaud, Patrick Wang’s three-hour biopic about French poet Arthur Rimbaud starring just one actor (Blake Draper); and Faces of Death, the notorious pseudo-documentary, which many presumed to be a real-life snuff movie upon its release in 1978. A new restoration of the film will have its world premiere at the festival.

For Ramsay and Hewitt, it was also important to celebrate the fact that communal viewing experiences are often more fun the worse the film is. It means that alongside Glauber Rocha’s Brazilian revisionist Western Black God, White Devil (1964) and Brian De Palma’s 1970 dark comedy Hi, Mom!, there’s a showing of 2003 action horror House of the Dead from panned filmmaker Uwe Boll.

In other words, all movies are welcome. “We have movie nights where we watch these films and they’re so fun,” Ramsay says. “People love those experiences. I think that, as an experience, is as exciting as going to the premiere of a more arch and critically respected film.”

With any luck, The Final Film Festival should provide an outlet for directors to screen films that might be turned away from bigger, more mainstream festivals – and could even inject adrenaline into a burgeoning indie filmmaking scene similar to thriving ones in New York, LA and Toronto.

“My dream is that we could provide a launching pad for films made by Londoners or British filmmakers,” Hewitt explains. “And when it comes to knowing where to put it, it’s going to be buried at LFF, but it will be championed at our festival.”

The Final Film Festival runs from 6-9 August. You can find the line-up here.