For the penultimate programme in our month-long series of secret films celebrating Close-Up Cinema’s one-year anniversary, we’re excited to announce our three special guests: curator and filmmaker Adam Roberts; radical artist, filmmaker, and theorist John Akomfrah; and curator, and writer Shama Khanna. Each of our guests has been asked to introduce films that neither they, nor you, will know the identity of until it’s screened. Expect the unexpected!

Curated by Schtinter, the Liberated Film Club programme consists of more than 23 lost, banned and forgotten films you cannot see anywhere else and you will not see again, screened each Friday, Saturday and Sunday throughout the month. No titles will be announced in advance, but look out for further exciting guest announcements in the following weeks.

Remember unexpected pleasures are the best kind!

Friday 22 July: Slovak, Buddha and our Lady of the Flaubert

Introduction by curator and filmmaker Adam Roberts

Kicking off our celebration of Jean Genet with a film entirely unrelated to Jean Genet. No – to paraphrase Flaubert and a hundred Buddha’s before him: anything becomes connected depending on how deeply you look at it.

A stranger is allowed to live in the house of another stranger. The stranger believes he can predict crimes, and when one doesn’t happen: the universe is upset, and everyone must pay.

Considered one of the finest Liberated Films ever made; a deep, dark and immensely absorbing film.

Saturday 23 July: Querelle Down the Chimney (And Up the Spout)

Introduction by radical artist, filmmaker, and theorist John Akomfrah

An independent film made in the mid-1960s about a hardware store in South America couldn’t possibly say so much of today, could it?

Popular singer in Argentina tackles an impossibilist capitalism and its conditioning of love on screen. Genet might have liked this film... and trivia: apparently he never saw Fassbinder’s Querelle, for no cinema at that escalating time was willing to host the chimney smoking Jean!

Sunday 24 July: Nico's End

Introduction by curator and writer Shama Khanna

Because it’s rare the right person is punished. By the most important director of mid-20th century Greece, and close friend of Genet (who we may presume he stole from often), and from whom Andy Warhol stole the name for that blonde, drug-addled German who crystallised the majesty of The Velvet Underground.

Part of Close-Up Cinema first anniversary programmes