What's On

In September 2025, Hackney's queer community was invited to film a day in their lives, creating an intimate snapshot of queer people at work, at rest and in community. The resulting film is an ode to collaborative filmmaking. Made on a micro-budget by a proudly trans, non-binary, queer and neurodivergent team whose love, sweat and joy seeps into the film and makes themes of resilience, connection ...

The blistered moon whispers a welcome to the eldritch abominations of a twisted internet. We’re wearing our love of all things cosmic horror on our shimmering sleeves tonight, this screening is a celebration of the myriad anomalous destinations digital culture has taken the otherworldly horrors popularised by the H.P Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos. We’ll be showcasing a blend of machinima, shorts, anim...

Have you got a black eyeliner pencil sitting in your room? Are you intimately familiar with the process of removing days worth of Schwarzkopf Got2B Glued from your hair? Do you consider yourself Not Okay? Then come along to Let ’s Go Emo ! A cross platform programme exploring how young people use digital media to express identity, creativity and community, Let ’s Go Emo ! combines early YouTube v...

Doc'n Roll presents HAKEEM (+ Q&A and Acoustic Set) dir. DEADHORSES | UK | 2024 Doc’n Roll is delighted to be part of The Music is Black Festival from East Bank and to bring a special event to the Rio Cinema celebrating one of London’s most distinctive contemporary musicians, Hak Baker. The evening will include a special screening of Hakeem, live Q&A, and an intimate acoustic performance by Hak ...

Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival, Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a biographical drama film about the famous jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. 1961. Bill Evans is playing with what he considers the perfect musical trio until tragedy strikes in the premature death of his bass player, Scott LaFaro - his musical soulmate. Traumatised by grief, Evans stops ...

Yeah Yeah Yeahs present a special evening of music and cinema, pairing Barnaby Clay’s HIDDEN IN PIECES — a dreamlike black-and-white visual companion to the band’s Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall record — with Charles Laughton’s haunting 1955 classic THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, personally selected by Karen O. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, follows Rev. Harry Powell, played by an indelible ...

Join Never Watching Movies and Claire Harrison (usually found at Category H film club) for an evening screening of CAR WASH (1976). Follow the daily life of Dee-Luxe Car Wash employees, a tight-knit team who make the most of their minimum wage job, meeting eccentric individuals passing through the wash. The film features the iconic Rose Royce song of the same name, infamously written on a (fried c...

In this recent documentary Scottish film-maker Mark Forbes explores the reality of working-class exclusion from Britain's film industry through 16 interviews with actors, screenwriters and cinematographers including Maxine Peake, Vicky McClure, Paul Laverty ( I, Daniel Blake ) and Rachel Clark ( Dune: Part I and F1: The Movie ). Self-funded and shot over two years without a crew, Forbes' film is c...

At the hyper-competitive Enshan school, students are kept in line by state-of-the-art AI surveillance technology and iSmart, a nationwide tech initiative that tracks performance and attendance. In the days before the elite school’s final exams, order descends into chaos when an anonymous note predicts the suicide of an unnamed student. Join us for the UK premiere of this latest film by acclaimed...

A father’s fading memory and echoes of a free Tibet lie at the heart of this intimate family story. In 1959 the Dalai Lama escaped Chinese occupation to India, followed by thousands of Tibetans. Over six decades later, as TC Tethong—former deputy to His Holiness—begins to lose his memory, remarkable family archives resurface, bringing to life a hopeful love story between TC and Judy, a Canadian vo...

Join We Are Parable in collaboration with The Music is Black Festival from East Bank for a Masterclass in Black British Music Videos. We’ll be showing some of the most iconic music videos of our time on the big screen, featuring two leading voices in the industry: Award winning director Mo Ali (who has worked with Skepta, Lethal Bizzle, Bashy and Chip) and Music Video rep Lee Fairweather (collabo...

In recent years, Angie Chen has been rightfully recognised as a much overlooked contributor to the innovative Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s. Her second feature was conceived to disenchant the orientalist fairytale of bar hostesses in the Hollywood romance drama The World of Suzie Wong (1960), which cast Nancy Kwan as the exotic love interest of an Englishman. Rather than Suzie, the name of the h...

Tim & Barry take over the Rio for a night of two halves. Video Dubs digs through 25 years of archive, treating the videos a bit like records, with DJs mixing grime, uk funky, footwork - freestyles, Just Jam clips, No Miming, Beat This and more live on the cinema screen through a massive sound system. Then Just Jam takes over, bringing its psychedelic, anything-can-happen energy into the cinema f...

To celebrate the launch of new satirical haunted house novel THE CRACKS, join genre fiction leaders Titan Books and Hackney-based author T.H. Huddleston for a screening of the original (and best) hook-handed horror classic. Just don't say his name five times... A visually sumptuous and texturally rich urban-Gothic slasher fantasy from British director Bernard Rose ( Paperhouse, ivansxtc ), CANDYM...

The ritual is in place, the village has assembled, an old god emerges from a hole in the ground, the JPEG stutters, they all turn at once, towards you, on the other side of the screen. We’re gathered here today to experience the echoes of oral traditions through the lens of the internet's own horrific folklore, the Chinese whispers persisting in the digital imaginations of a web culture that must...

The ultimate Halloween thrill ride, QUEER HORROR NIGHTS returns to the Rio with our spectacular midnight sing-along screening of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) featuring a live Shadow Cabaret Cast performing in front of the film. A “phenomenal night” of "pure chaotic queer joy”, our shadow cast of kings, queens, and things from London's queer cabaret scene gives THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHO...

The smell of doughnuts and candyfloss, vomiting on the waltzers and rides that probably haven’t passed any kind of safety test - don’t we all have fond memories of the fun fair? At Category H Film Club, we’re bringing the terror of the fairground Rio’s screen two with a late night double bill of MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD + FINAL DESTINATION 3, as we enjoy A Night At The Funfair. Malatesta’s C...

Classic Matinee LOCAL HERO dir. Bill Forsyth | UK | 1983 For our September Classic Matinee, we’re heading to the windswept Scottish coast with LOCAL HERO, Bill Forsyth’s much-loved comedy-drama about place, belonging and the value of what cannot be bought... When an ambitious American oil executive is sent to a remote Highland village to purchase the land for a new refinery, he expects a st...

After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original's star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

Join Fringe! and Pink Palace for a 25 th anniversary screening of Y2K camp classic Josie & The Pussycats. For all the punk rock Prom Queens and Backdoor Lovers, we hope you DuJour this criminally underrated early 2000’s film just as much as we do! Let’s get subliminal and slip back towards the millennium to hang out with wannabe rockstars Josie, Melody and Valerie as they try to make it big agains...

Pink Palace brings you this often overlooked milestone in lesbian cinema. Ground breaking when it appeared in UK cinemas, lesbian director Donna Deitch’s uplifting romance was one of the first films to look at a non-dramatic, non-sensational happy positive romance. The 1950’s set story follows literature professor Vivian as she awaits her divorce to be finalised in the desert heat of Reno, Nevada...

Pink Palace in conjunction with Lobotomy Room (devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People), presents The Wasp Woman (tagline: “A beautiful woman by day – a lusting queen wasp by night!”). Directed by wildly influential and prolific high potentate of low-budget cinema Roger Corman. It begins with that perennial science fiction archetype – the mad scientist. In his crimes-against-nature experiments, Dr E...

Ban this perverted filth! Was the headline when David Cronenberg adapted J.G. Ballard’s classic underground novel in 1996, and Westminster Council banned it from screening in central London, even though the film had been given an 18 cert from the BBFC. This is deeply unsettling psychological cinema, the story follows a group of people who’s lives intersect as they find sexual arousal in car crash...

Saturday Morning Picture Club presents WALL•E (+ Craft Activities) dir. Andrew Stanton | US | 2008 Join us from 10.15am for craft activities, before the film screening at 11am! The Rio’s beloved and historic Saturday Morning Picture Club is back with WALL•E, Pixar’s imaginative and heartwarming tale of friendship, adventure and caring for our planet. Before the screening, we will have ar...

Two teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most-each other. Something rather nasty is unfolding in this conversion-therapy horror. If you asked the god-fearing residents of the isolated Australian town at its centre, they would say it’s the curse of homosexuality, quietly infecting the youth. If you asked the gay teens themselves, they would say it...

Raúl is a cult filmmaker in the midst of a creative crisis. When tragedy strikes one of his closest collaborators, he draws inspiration from it to write his next film. Little by little, he imagines Elsa, a filmmaker in the midst of writing a script, whose journey begins to mirror his own. The two filmmakers become two sides of the same character, in a game of mirrors where the raw honesty of autof...

After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original's star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival, Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a biographical drama film about the famous jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. 1961. Bill Evans is playing with what he considers the perfect musical trio until tragedy strikes in the premature death of his bass player, Scott LaFaro - his musical soulmate. Traumatised by grief, Evans stops ...

A provocative psychological thriller following a swaggering fetish camboy (Kieron Moore) who accepts a private house call, only to discover a personal connection: his masked client (Birney) is his former middle-school teacher and a convicted sex offender. “Queer cinema, by its very name, is meant to challenge. It challenges the establishment, it challenges perceptions and it challenges the viewer...

Contemporary 75 in association with Club des Femmes presents IN PROTEST OF THE BOMB Two milestone films of anti-nuclear activism from the 1950s and 1980s, as relevant today as ever. For four days during Easter, 1958, thousands marched from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Hampshire. The resulting film, MARCH TO ALDERMASTON , a voluntary work by anonymous film techn...

Described by Spike Lee as ‘one of the most underappreciated filmmakers of his time’, African-American playwright turned actor-writer-director Bill Gunn’s radical 1973 vampire movie Ganja & Hess returns as part of our ongoing Rio Forever celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the cinema in its current form. The screening will be preceded by a contextualising introduction from author and curat...

RIO FOREVER: LITTLE WHITE LIES PRESENTS… A CELLULOID SURPRISE #2 ON 35MM Wed 16 September 18:00 Presented on a glorious 35mm film print and hand-picked by a member of the Little White Lies editorial team, satisfaction is all but guaranteed. Celluloid Suprise #1 was John Water's iconic SERIAL MOM, presented on a print from the Cinema Museum.. This time round, the only clue we can give you is that...

Pink Palace and Contemporary Films present THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK (+ Q&A with Rob Epstein) dir. Rob Epstein | USA | 1984 Pink Palace joins forces with Contemporary Films to present this Oscar winning documentary, back on the big screen at the Rio. In 1978, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco city council, one year later, he and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by Milk s fell...

As part of our ongoing Rio Forever celebrations, we’re delighted to welcome back Oscar-winning film director and homegrown Hackney hero Asif Kapadia to introduce another of his favourite films: Takashi Miike’s relentless, clinical horror masterpiece AUDITION . A (literally) piercing critique of Japanese masculinity featuring one of the most upsetting climactic sequences in movie history, Audition...

For this edition of Category H horror film clubs ongoing season Rio Forever/Rio Never, we investigate the nebulous world of horror Remakes with a late night double bill of SEYTAN X THE FLY. This 25th of September, 23:30-late, only at the Rio Cinema. So often, horror remakes cast a Western lens on non Western production. So, what happens when this is reversed and Hollywood is the one being reworke...

Prepare to watch amazing brand new short films including award winning short film 'Two Black Boys In Paradise' and an exciting Q&A with BAFTA Winner and Acclaimed Poet Dean Atta. Get ready to be inspired, moved, and entertained by the unique perspectives showcased on screen. Don't miss out on this exciting gathering of innovative storytellers! This is a safe intersectional screening for neurodiver...

As part of our ongoing Rio Forever celebrations marking the 50 th anniversary of the cinema, we’re over the moon to welcome local resident, film enthusiast and one of the world’s finest living actors, Ben Whishaw, to introduce one of his own favourite films: Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s tender tribute to cinema spaces, GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003). In a crumbling movie house in downtown T...

As part of our anniversary celebrations, we take a detour into the Rio’s saucy 1970’s years as the Dalston Tatler, one of London’s highest grossing porn cinema clubs with an uncensored grindhouse programme and a full burlesque striptease extravaganza stage show. We delve into the lurid stories and legends of this era with a fully illustrated talk packed with scandalous details, and an overview of...

Ever wondered what it's like working in the UK's longest running cinema? Join Never Watching Movies for a special Rio Forever screening of EMPIRE RECORDS (1995) + Q&A! Follow the story of Empire records, the coolest music store in town. After one of the employees blows the store's cash, the team faces the threat of becoming a conglomerate. The young adults running the store come together to try t...