Succession creator Jesse Armstrong will be among the headline speakers at this year’s inaugural cinema programme at the Hay Literary Festival.
Running from May 22nd to June 1st, the longtime literary festival announced its plans earlier this month to expand with a new sidebar dedicated to cinema in collaboration with Mubi.
The full festival programme was announced this morning and Armstrong will feature in the cinema talks programme alongside Normal People and I May Destroy You intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, director Marc Evans, producer Ed Talfan and screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams (Mr Burton).
Rebecca Lenkiewicz will also pass through Hay to discuss her adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk while novelist Robert Harris discusses the adaptation of his novel Conclave.
The festival’s screening programme, taking place at the newly erected Mubi Cinema, will screen titles from the Mubi catalog including Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Mati Diop’s Dahomey, and Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World.
Other titles set to screen include How to Have Sex, Queer, First Cow, Alcarràs, Decision to Leave, Aftersun, Priscilla, Perfect Days, Petite Maman, and The Worst Person in the World.
Other standout films and TV names set for the fest include Jameela Jamil, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, and artist Grayson Perry.
Elsewhere, Hay Festival will this year launch the George Alagiah Lecture to celebrate the late BBC newsreader George Alagiah. Once one of the BBC’s most respected journalists, Alagiah died in 2023 after being diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer.
The inaugural lecture will be introduced by Alagiah’s son Matt and delivered by writer Hisham Matar on Monday 26 May. In his lecture, Matar will talk about the late Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the Arab world’s best known writers.
