The Liberated Film Club

Marking the twentieth anniversary of Close-Up, we are delighted to announce the return of Stanley Schtinter’s legendary Liberated Film Club.

"Because you’re sick of knowing exactly what you’re going to get, and you’re sick when you get it…"

Operational at Close-Up in 2016 and 2019-20, each event followed the same format: Schtinter would invite a special guest (Laura Mulvey, Dennis Cooper, John Akomfrah and many more) to introduce a film, but neither they nor the audience attending would know in advance what the film was going to be. This was described by Sight & Sound as “an intensification of the original promise of going to the cinema… a void that audiences could jump into.”

The Liberated Film Club will run twice monthly for the duration of Close-Up’s anniversary year, from July 2025 to July 2026. Films will follow the original parameters of “lost, banned, or made in impossible circumstances,” but this time Schtinter has ‘liberated’ the Liberated Film Club: passing all programming and presentation duties to the guests.

Guest programmers include: Peggy Ahwesh, Erika Balsom, Oliver Bancroft, Ruth Beckermann, Daniel Blumberg, Camelia Committee (Mira Adoumier, Carine Doumit and Nour Ouayda), Lucile Hadžihalilović, Eve Heller, Light Industry (Thomas Beard, Ed Halter), Toby Jones, David Keenan, Esther Kinsky, Stacy Martin, Jonathan Meades, Sharna Pax (Maeve Brennan, Therese Henningsen, Tinne Zenner), Morgan Quaintance, Hannah Regel, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sukhdev Sandhu, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, John Smith, Courtney Stephens, Peter Tscherkassky, Ana Vaz, Weathergirl (Bronte Dow, Freya Field-Donovan)

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The Liberated Film Club: David Keenan

We launch the series with a programme curated and presented by very special guest David Keenan. David Keenan is the author of six critically acclaimed novels: the cult classic, This Is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore award, Xstabeth/The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and Industry of Magic & Light. He is also the author of Volcanic Tongue, which collects his music writing over 25 years, and England’s Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK’s post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was 17 years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2005 and 2015 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue.

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The Liberated Film Club: Erika Balsom

For the second edition in this yearlong series of events, we welcome Erika Balsom to select and present her ‘liberated film’ choice. Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London, working on cinema, art, and their intersection. She is Reader in Film Studies at King's College London and holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

No titles at the Liberated Film Club are announced in advance, and the films on show are unlikely to be seen anywhere else – in the case of Balsom’s selection, it is impossible for the film to be seen anywhere else.

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The Liberated Film Club: Oliver Bancroft

In this third of many events, we welcome guest programmer Oliver Bancroft, who has been central to Close-Up since its inception. Recognised as “one of the outstanding young painters of his generation” (Goldmark), Bancroft works across painting, print, photography, video and film, and has exhibited internationally at Liverpool Biennial, The Barbican, London, and Pompidou Centre, Paris. He lives and works by the river.

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The Liberated Film Club: Esther Kinsky

Close-Up is thrilled to welcome Esther Kinsky to programme and present this edition of the Liberated Film Club. Kinsky is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children’s books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Białoszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Seeing Further is her fourth book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and documents the period she spent in rural Hungary establishing and running a cinema. By her own admission, Kinsky does not possess a screen, and “never watches anything outside of the cinema.”

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The Liberated Film Club: Jonathan Meades

One of a series of upcoming surprise additions to the nothing-if-not-surprising Liberated Film Club yearlong programme: the writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades will curate a weekend of ? at Close-Up Film Centre. Saturday September 6 and Sunday September 7 will witness two five-hour blocks of motion picture curated and anotated by Meades, who describes his selection “an exercise in memory and false memory.”

Meades has written and performed in some 60 televisual essays, mostly on architecture, identity and tyranny. His most recent fiction is Empty Wigs, a 900-page assault weapon.

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The Liberated Film Club: Courtney Stephens

The Liberated Film Club continues with an evening programmed and presented by special guest Courtney Stephens, whose most recent feature film, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (co-directed with Michael Almereyda and narrated by Chloë Sevigny), is showing at this year's BFI London Film Festival. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Stephens has co-curated the Los Angeles miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014.

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The Liberated Film Club: Lucile Hadžihalilović

In London for the UK premiere of her new film The Ice Tower (2025), we are delighted to welcome Lucile Hadžihalilović to curate this edition of the Liberated Film Club. Hadžihalilović's films include La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996), Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015), and Earwig (2021). A frequent collaborator of Gaspar Noé, her work has screened at Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, and numerous international festivals.

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The Liberated Film Club: Weathergirl

The Liberated Film Club presents a Halloween special curated by Weathergirl, the programming duo comprising Brontë Dow and Freya Field-Donovan, known for their hugely popular itinerant screening series focused on funny, sad and perverse artists' moving image. Dress-up not discouraged.

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The Liberated Film Club: Morgan Quaintance

For November’s final edition of the Liberated Film Club, we welcome artist and writer Morgan Quaintance as guest programmer. Born on the premises of St Thomas’ Hospital in 1979, not in earshot of the bow bells, but still an incontrovertible South Londoner, Quaintance avoided early gang affiliations, death and borstal, to rise through the more perilous ranks of the UK art world in the 2010s. Refusing institutional affiliations for the more ’noble’ territory of near obscure precarity, Quaintance has embraced the margins by choice and necessity, but could “do with some cash and a kind word”. Of his (Liberated) Club night, he states: “in an age of issues related programming let’s get to the core of the most important and enduring one: what it means to be human”.

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The Liberated Film Club: John Smith

Welcoming John Smith, the patron saint of Liberated Film, to programme and present the Club. Smith's most recent film, Being John Smith, has screened at more than 40 international film festivals and received numerous prizes. His current solo exhibition continues at Secession in Vienna until November 16. The most complete survey – or 'introspective' – of his film work was held across London, principally at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Close-Up Film Centre, in 2022.

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