Most festivals aren’t dreamed up while watching Assassin 33 AD Director’s Cut: Black Easter – a critically derided time travel film from 2020 starring Heidi Montag from The Hills – but that’s exactly how a brand new three-day event, set to hit London next month, got its start. “We were kinda like, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if there was a festival that showed something that would be genuinely unprogrammable?” co-organiser Kit Ramsay says. “And that was the beginning,”
From 6 to 9 August, The Final Film Festival will launch with an inaugural line-up of international premieres and rarely screened hidden gems being screened in the city’s best cinemas, ranging from the ICA to The Castle Cinema and the Peckhamplex. Not bad for an idea that spawned less than four months ago. But the dream has been “percolating” for the last decade, with Ramsay and fellow organiser Jack Hewitt long-time regulars on the global festival scene: Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, pop-up cinemas in east London and, of course, the behemoth that is Cannes. For them, this new festival was about offering an alternative option packed with films other organisers would baulk at.
