BFI Southbank previews Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea on 17 September 2026 in NFT1, followed by a Q&A with its star Juliette Binoche, ahead of the film's Curzon release.
Juliette 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 Academy Award 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 Lance Hammer’s second feature. His first, Ballast, which he wrote, directed and edited himself, premiered at Sundance in January 2008, and rather than sell it he released it through his own company. Eighteen years separate the two films, and the new one took the Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlin, so the interval has cost him nothing in standing.
The preview is at BFI Southbank on Thursday 17 September 2026 at 6pm in NFT1, with Binoche on stage for a conversation afterwards. The film follows a daughter who comes to doubt that her stepfather has her mother’s interests at heart as the mother lives with advanced dementia, with Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall as the parents. It reaches British cinemas through Curzon after this screening, and the Southbank preview is its only London date before that release.