Andrew Haigh, the director of 45 Years and All of Us Strangers, brought his adaptation of a Colm Tóibín story to the Royal Festival Hall as a festival gala.
Andrew Haigh, the director of All of Us Strangers, gave A Long Winter its UK premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Wednesday 14 October 2026. The screening was a gala of the BFI London Film Festival.
Haigh was born in Harrogate in 1973, grew up in Croydon and read history at Newcastle University. He learned the craft as an assistant editor on Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.
Weekend, his second feature, won the audience award at SXSW in 2011. In 2015, 45 Years took the top acting prizes at the Berlin festival for Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.
A Long Winter adapts a short story by Colm Tóibín, the Irish novelist of Brooklyn. Mike returns to his childhood home in the Colorado mountains and slips back into the rituals of family life. When his mother disappears in the season’s first snowstorm, he is left to renegotiate everything with his father.
The gala repeated in the same hall the following lunchtime, and the film plays Curzon Soho on Saturday 17 October.
Fred Hechinger leads the cast, with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Caitríona Balfe and Kit Connor.