We sat down for an exclusive interview with Rhianna Dhillon who presents a new monthly series for BFI Player celebrating female friendship and chosen family through the Galentine’s Day collection, featuring films like Frances Ha and Daisies. She will also curate a BFI Flare collection on March 9th, honouring 40 years of the London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival with highlights including Weekend, Beach Rats, and Young Soul Rebels.
View the Galentine’s Day collection here
What drew you to frame your first BFI Player collections around female friendship and queer cinema, and what conversations were you hoping to spark with those themes?
I try to theme my curations around something relevant that is happening each month, so for January, I picked the idea of “Fresh Starts”, as we’re all thinking about resolutions and a new year. For February, I loved the idea of doing something a bit “anti-valentine” and Galentine’s Day (February 13th) seemed the perfect opportunity to celebrate films about female friendships – I always enjoy seeing parallels between me and my friends and characters on screen, whether it’s bickering, getting ready for a night out or just generally being a bit over-familiar – and I hope that audiences also love seeing themselves reflected in this way! The BFI Flare Film Festival takes place in March, so there didn’t seem a better moment to talk about some of my all time favourite LGBTQIA+ films from BFI Player.
When curating films about female friendship for Galentine’s Day, what qualities or emotional truths were you looking for that you feel are often overlooked on screen?
I think I was especially mining films for their portrayals of how weird and unhinged women can be when they’re together – the safe space where they can be completely off the wall, share their darkest truths and challenge each other. With Frances Ha, I talk about how it uses almost romantic tropes to show how deep the bonds of female friendships can run. In Julie and Celeste Go Boating, I love the obsessive nature of the characters – like them, I often find myself drawn to gregarious, outgoing women and it really taps into that desire for excitement in your friendships as much as in your love life.
How do you approach balancing well-known classics with underrated gems when building a collection meant to represent the breadth of queer cinema?
I don’t deliberately think too much about that balance, I just look for threads which work for the topics I’ve chosen – I think the spectrum of the films on offer speaks more to the versatility of BFI Player – because they have a bit of everything. There are lots of titles that audiences may know the name of but have never actually watched, so hopefully, by highlighting those films alongside more well known ones, audiences will have fun exploring something new. It’s also a great chance to look deeper at the back catalogue of a director or actor you love. If you’re a big fan of Harris Dickinson, check out Beach Rats! If you loved All of Us Strangers, make sure to watch Andrew Haigh’s Weekend!
In your view, how has the representation of chosen family in film evolved over the past few decades, particularly within LGBTQIA+ storytelling?
I love the films that are about the safe spaces that queer communities exist within – maybe that’s become more and more prevalent in recent years – The term “chosen family” is only about 35 years old and LGBTQIA stories have been told on screen for a lot longer, but I think the difference now is that queer stories are starting to have the joyful endings that films about straight love often have. Perhaps in the past, there was more of an emphasis on trauma and shame but it definitely feels like there’s a shift as audiences’ understanding and acceptance has evolved – filmmaking is of course part of this understanding, which is why festivals like BFI Flare are so important in showcasing different stories.
As a critic stepping into a curatorial role, how does selecting films for an audience differ from writing about them after the fact?
These curations and the video essays that go alongside them have been so much fun because it’s a completely different slant on film criticism – instead of a written or verbal review, the films themselves can do so much off the talking for me in the video essay, so I can show audiences exactly what I mean, or break down a scene within a film to demonstrate what it is that I love so much.
As most of these films aren’t brand new releases, I’m also getting the benefit of understanding a film’s impact on the social and cultural landscape so it’s not just about whether or not a film is worth seeing which is essentially what I’m doing when I review – it’s understanding how the theme has evolved since its release, and asking how it fits in with other films in the same genre that either came before it, or since.
With BFI Flare celebrating 40 years, what do you think its legacy tells us about the cultural power of film festivals in shaping visibility and inclusion?
Film festivals like BFI Flare are so vital for amplifying voices who may struggle to tell their stories elsewhere. In a world where filmmakers can still be arrested for films about minorities, queer filmmaking can feel like a political act but BFI Flare allows for the full spectrum of human experience on the big screen – love, heartbreak, grief and joy. It truly is a celebration and it’s so important for festivals like this to exist so that queer stories have the space to breathe. I also love that BFI Flare has always felt like such an inclusive, exciting, vibrant festival, where it feels like you can discover movies that will stay with you for the rest of your life.