Reclaim the Frame presents: Beautiful Thing

Beautiful Thing is back on the big screen at HOME on Monday 26 October, as part of a 30th-anniversary run. It's a 35mm screening, so it's the real thing on film rather than a digital projection, and it's being presented by Reclaim The Frame.

If you haven't seen it, Beautiful Thing is Hettie Macdonald's feature debut, an adaptation of Jonathan Harvey's own stage play, which Channel 4 Films commissioned. It's set on a South East London housing estate and follows neighbours Jamie and Ste, whose friendship deepens into first love over one long, hot summer. Along the way there's Jamie's mum, Sandra, and the outspoken neighbour Leah, whose devotion to Mama Cass provides the soundtrack. It's a tender story of first love and growing up, and it's just as easy to love now as it was when it first came out.

It's also a bit of a piece of cinema history. The film premiered at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival — now BFI Flare — where it won the Best Film Award, and it screened in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes before its UK theatrical release in June 1996. From there it became a landmark of British Queer Cinema. It was the start of Macdonald's career, too; she went on to Doctor Who (2007-15), Howards End (2017), Normal People (2020), and her second feature, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2023).

The screening is part of Reclaim The Frame's UK-wide 30th-anniversary campaign, and it also sits within the BFI Film Audience Network's 'Rip It Up' season, which marks 75 years of UK youth culture on screen. So it's more than just a one-off showing — it's one of a few dates across the country, and part of a wider look at how youth culture has been captured on film over the decades. The screening is at HOME Cinema in Manchester on Monday 26 October.