Juliette Binoche joined BFI Southbank's preview of Queen at Sea, Lance Hammer's Silver Bear-winning second feature, eighteen years after his debut Ballast.
BFI Southbank previewed Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea in NFT1 on Thursday 17 September 2026, with Juliette Binoche in conversation after the screening, ahead of the film’s cinema release.
Binoche was born in Paris in 1964 and has made more than sixty films in French and English across four decades. She took Best Actress at Venice for Three Colours: Blue in 1993, the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The English Patient in 1996, an Oscar nomination for Chocolat in 2000 and Best Actress at Cannes in 2010. She and Julianne Moore are the only two actresses to have won an acting prize at all three of the major European festivals.
Queen at Sea is Hammer’s second feature. His first, Ballast, which he wrote, directed and edited, premiered at Sundance in January 2008, and he released it through his own company rather than sell it. Eighteen years separate the two films, and the new one took the Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlin.
The film follows a daughter who comes to doubt that her stepfather has her mother’s interests at heart while her mother lives with advanced dementia, with Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall as the parents. Binoche joined a conversation on stage in NFT1 after the screening, the film’s only London date before it reached British cinemas through Curzon.