Obituary: Andrea Sabbadini

Andrea Sabbadini, Fellow of the British Society, died at the age of 75 on 11 July 2025. Twenty-five years ago, Don Campbell, then President of the British Society, suggested to Andrea that he start a film festival; the response was “Yes, but it has to be a European festival.” Thus began Andrea’s most influential contribution to psychoanalysis: founding, organising and chairing the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, a biennial cultural highlight that took place under his direction from 2001 until 2019 – a total of ten festivals, nine of them at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London; 117 films were shown in total, from at least 27 countries. Panels involved invited experts, including actors and directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci (who became the Festival’s Patron and the Society’s first Honorary Fellow), Juliet Stevenson, Fiona Shaw, Stephen Frears, Michael Apted and Ken Loach, as well as academics, film theorists and critics (Laura Mulvey, Ian Christie, Michael Billington), discussing their ideas and work with psychoanalysts. The festival continues, its next occurrence due in November 2026. One central feature will be a tribute to Andreas for this brainchild.

One particularly memorable event for me was Andrea’s presentation of the Walter Salles film Behind the Sun, based on Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare’s Broken April, with its scene of oxen threshing grain by walking in circles, a vivid metaphor in the context of ritualised revenge for Freud’s notion of repetition compulsion.

Through my years on the EPFF committee (2000–2004), I saw what a fine leader Andrea was, both “general and foot soldier”, in the words of another committee member Kannan Navaratnem. This was exemplified, Kannan wrote,

in his approach to timetabling, which might in other hands have led to chaos, BAFTA had two main rooms suitable for showing films, with different seating capacities, at each of which participants had to choose between events of varying lengths. People also often wanted breaks for coff