10 July 2025 - 17 July 2026: The Liberated Film Club
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
The Liberated Film Club: Sukhdev Sandhu
Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night, Other Musics, and Geologic Listening. Sandhu makes radio documentaries for the BBC, runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University, and is a film writer for Prospect magazine. On the earlier incarnation of the Liberated Film Club, he wrote, “Schtinter runs with wolves. His Liberated Film Club was, throughout its brief, perfect existence, the antidote to contemporary cinephilia. It was impious and sexy, mysterious and unsober, a ululatory free zone for refuseniks, a place of magic and mayonnaise.”
The Liberated Film Club: Jennifer Lucy Allan
Welcoming writer, music journalist, broadcaster and amateur ceramicist Jennifer Lucy Allan. Allan writes mainly on experimental music and culture for various outlets and hosts the long-running Late Junction on BBC Radio 3. Her most recent book, Clay: A Human History, was published in 2024. Her first book The Foghorn's Lament was published in 2021, preceded by a PhD on the history of the foghorn at UAL/CRiSAP. Previously she co-ran the record label Arc Light Editions and worked at The Wire as online editor. She has a large appetite.
The Liberated Film Club: Daniel Blumberg
The Liberated Film Club welcomes Daniel Blumberg, the musician best known for his scores for Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, and Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee.
The Liberated Film Club: Mihály Víg
Composer, musician, poet and actor, Mihály Víg is recognised internationally for his lifelong creative partnership with Béla Tarr, in one of filmmaking’s most prodigious and singular collaborations. Along with providing all the music for Tarr’s films, Víg starred in Sátántangó, and is celebrated for his work in the seminal underground Hungarian bands Balaton and trabant.
In London to perform with Balaton at Cafe Oto on February 25, Close-Up is delighted to welcome Mihály Víg to programme the Liberated Film Club, London’s cinematic leap into the void where no film titles are announced in advance of the screenings.
The Liberated Film Club: Sharna Pax
Sharna Pax is a film collective working between the fields of anthropology, documentary, and visual art. They work independently as artists and filmmakers and collaboratively organise screenings and discussions as part of their ongoing dialogue. Founded in 2013 by Maeve Brennan, Therese Henningsen and Tinne Zenner. Based in London and Copenhagen.
The Liberated Film Club: Sophie Sleigh-Johnson
Welcoming Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. Sleigh-Johnson’s book Code: Damp - An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms (2024, Repeater Books) brings 1970s comic actor Leonard Rossiter into communion with the Hierophantic mystical tradition, extruded through the spagyric material and metaphor of damp. Here, the magnetic field of the television image bids occult artefact and memory to coagulate one to another. “I didn't get where I am today without recognising ‘promising inroads’ when I see them,” she says, pace C.J. Her ongoing work is distributed across spoken word, sonic environments, printmaking, props, and local newspapers, and is written in periodicals including Darkside magazine, Faunus: The Journal of Arthur Machen Society, and The London Drinker. Recent projects include her curation of a special 'Code: Damp' Experimenta Mixtape series at the BFI. She lives in Southend-on-Sea.
The Liberated Film Club: Hannah Regel
Welcoming Hannah Regel, the author of the poetry collection Oliver Reed (2020 Montez Press) and the novel The Last Sane Woman (2024, Verso). A second poetry collection is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions. She works as an editor at Book Works.
The Liberated: Light Industry
The Liberated Film Club welcomes New York's Light Industry to London. Light Industry is a venue for cinema in all its forms in Brooklyn, founded by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter in 2008, and operated by them ever since. A complete record of all its events is available at lightindustry.org
The Liberated Film Club: The Otolith Group
The Liberated Film Club welcomes The Otolith Group, an award-winning artist led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. Their moving image, audio works, performances and installations are characterized by an engagement with cosmogonic aesthetics that evoke the interscalar imagination of differentiated planetarity. Their works explores science fictions of the present that entail the work of temporal anomalisation, anthropic inversion and synthetic alienation.
The Liberated Film Club: Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Liberated Film Club welcomes Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum's recent books include In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader (2024), Travels in the Cities of Cinema (with Ehsan Khoshbakht, 2025) and Camera Movements That Confound Us (2025): jonathanrosenbaum.net
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