BFI's Rip It Up Season Hands Programming to Young Curators
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- BFI Film Audience Network launched the Rip It Up season, running May to October, tracing how British film and television have captured youth culture over seven decades through screenings, archive material, talks and live events.
- Producer Timon Singh said the season deliberately links to the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary celebrations of the 1951 Festival of Britain, noting that the teenager emerged as a distinct social group at roughly the same moment.
- Young programmers aged 19 to 29 developed a BFI Southbank takeover event covering trans youth culture, Black British fashion, female fandom, YouTube and digital identities — with Singh saying 'if you're doing something on UK youth culture, you get young programmers involved.'
- The season's programme includes a new 4K restoration of John Schlesinger's Billy Liar alongside Quadrophenia, Babylon, Human Traffic and Young Soul Rebels, mapping shifts from postwar conformity to reggae sound-system culture and rave-era nightlife.
- Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham continues to draw intergenerational crowds more than 20 years after release, with Chadha telling the BFI that parents who first saw the film now bring their own children.
- Imran Perretta's debut feature Ish, about two 12-year-old friends whose bond is tested by a police stop-and-search, joins the season alongside classics, explicitly addressing race, masculinity and adolescence.
- Regional strands include Queen's Film Theatre Belfast screening Lindsay Anderson's 1968 If… and Welsh-language artist Gwenno Llwyd Till creating an installation celebrating Catatonia, Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.
Why it matters: By handing curatorial control to 19-to-29-year-olds rather than treating youth as a subject to be programmed about, the BFI is making a concrete institutional shift at Southbank — and pairing it with restored classics that draw both the parents who saw them first and their children, creating a rare two-generation audience for British film.
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