The streaming service’s first London festival brings Q&As, restorations and a live horror podcast to Mare Street, with tickets sold online only.
LONDON, England (Shore Roar) – A streaming service is leaving the sofa and putting on a film festival in a real cinema, with real seats, real Q&As and, if you read the small print, no tickets sold at the door. MUBI Fest London runs at Hackney Picturehouse for three days this month, and it is the sort of weekend that Shoreditch’s film crowd will be tempted to treat as a local fixture, even if Mare Street is a short hop further north.
What MUBI is bringing to Mare Street
The dates are Friday 13 to Sunday 15 November 2026, at Hackney Picturehouse, 270 Mare Street, London E8 1HE, with Hackney Central named as the nearest station. Made in Shoreditch’s programme report says the festival includes early screenings of the films Rose and Coward and a preview of Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter.
Time Out first reported the plan in September, describing it as MUBI’s first ever film festival in London. Its writer Phil de Semlyen called it “a three-day mini film fest”, which is an accurate description of a programme that fits a lot into a long weekend.
Friday: Rose, Donnie Darko and a horror podcast
The opening film on Friday is Rose, starring Sandra Huller, in one of its first UK screenings, followed by a Q&A with director Markus Schleinzer. Later that day the programme includes a 4K restoration of Donnie Darko, marking its 25th anniversary, a live recording of the Evolution of Horror podcast on the subject of adolescence, and a screening of Drive followed by a live music night with Crack Magazine.
That is a tidy spread of the things film festivals now do to look alive: a new prestige drama, a cult favourite polished up, a podcast taking a stage and a late-night event that blurs cinema with a club. For an area that likes to describe itself as the home of the nocturnal creative, it is a reasonable bet.
Saturday and Sunday: the long list
Saturday brings Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, shown with the London Review of Books, and Lukas Dhont’s Coward, with a Q&A featuring co-screenwriter Angelo Tijssens and actors Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia. It also lists Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, Horace Ove’s 1976 film Pressure with a panel on Black British cinema, Diego Cespedes’s The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, the 1973 film A Bigger Splash by Jack Hazan, and the 1999 comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous.
On Sunday there is a preview of A Long Winter introduced by Andrew Haigh. Time Out’s event page for the festival describes it as Haigh’s adaptation of a Colm Toibin short story. Also on the bill are Paul Thomas Anderson’s Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, shot on 35mm and 16mm, the London premiere of the Sundance-winning documentary Nuisance Bear with filmmaker Jack Weisman and producer Teddy Leifer, Frederick Wiseman’s 1984 film The Store, and a cap customisation workshop by East London streetwear brand SCRT.
Tickets, age limits and the fine print
The practicalities are worth reading before you plan anything. Made in Shoreditch says tickets are sold only on DICE and none will be sold at the venue, that screenings start at about 12 to 14 pounds, and that seats are unreserved. The festival is for ages 18 and over. Time Out’s September coverage pointed readers to the festival’s own site, mubifest.com/en/london, and noted that MUBI subscribers got first access before general sale opened on 2 October, so check there for the current booking route.
There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about a company built on streaming asking you to queue in a foyer for a programme of films you could, in many cases, watch at home. The extras are what make that argument for the evening: a temporary MUBI Library of magazines and books, free shorts programmes, and Caribbean food from Original Flava. A cinema trip is a social event now, not a delivery mechanism, and the programme seems to know it.
Is it Shoreditch? A fair geography check
Not quite, and I would rather say so than stretch the map. Hackney Central is not Shoreditch High Street, and none of the sources I read places the festival in Shoreditch. The honest pitch is that it is an East London film weekend within reach of the neighbourhood’s cinema-going crowd, covered by a local Shoreditch site because that crowd will want to know. If you are coming from the Old Street side, check your route on the day, as I have not seen a journey time in any of the sources.
What can be said without a map is that the line-up is unusually well supplied with people in the room: directors, writers, actors and producers named for Q&As on all three days. That is the part of a festival that streaming cannot imitate, and it is the reason the weekend is worth planning around.
For readers who like a laugh between screenings
If you need something to read on the Overground, the London Prat has a corner of London humor news and a handy guide to how to spot a joke in the news, plus a page on English humor news for the same purpose. You can find more of my Shoreditch culture reporting at The London Prat, and the American sister title Bohiney Magazine keeps a similar eye on the circus. For the main page, head to The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/