On Monday night I attended a launch event hosted by the Swiss Embassy. Great Expectations, is a retrospective of Postwar British films that will screen at the Locarno film festival later this year. It was particularly interesting to hear curator Ehsan Khoshbakht talk about how he first encountered many of these British films on TV while growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. Apparently during the pre-revolutionary period, when relations with Britain were cordial, a good number of British studio-era pictures were sold to the national broadcaster.
After the revolution, Iranian TV struggled to import new films and they also needed material that would get past the censor – no overt sexuality being a major requirement. British films like It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) struck a delicate balance, alluding to violent crime and dark sexuality without being graphic, and of course there was no need to import them because the physical prints were already in Iranian archives. In some ways the situation is analogous to the way a young Martin Scorsese watched British films on TV in the USA – British films exploited a quirk in the local market (Hollywood studios, with their cinemas in direct competition for audiences with TV, refused to license their films to broadcasters). Given the state of Iran’s international relations and its stance on intellectual property law, it is not clear whether licensing fees were ever paid to British companies for the broadcasting of these films, but what is arguably more important is the role these films played in spreading representations of British society and culture.
There was also a brief appearance from Angela Allen, a legendary script supervisor (but in the immediate Postwar Era her title was “continuity girl”) who worked on a huge number of films from this era, including Carol Reed’s The Third Man (not in the Locarno retrospective for self-imposed curatorial rules: no fantasy, no films set outside mainland UK). I met her briefly in a BECTU event about ten years ago, and it is great to see that she is still as forthright and inspiring today as she was then.
The retrospective features 30+ features and has been compiled with the help of the BFI and the “encyclopaedic knowledge” of Josephine Botting. It will run at the Locarno Film Festival 6-16 August 2025. And the five little Swiss cocktail stick flags I found in my jacket pocket after the event confirm that the Swiss embassy’s cheese offering is as good as you would expect.
