Original cut of Star Wars to get rare screening at BFI

The festival will be opening with a cut of the film director George Lucas originally intended to be shown

The second edition of the British Film Institutions (BFI)’s Film on Film festival is due to take place in London this summer with a memorable opening night for Star Wars fans.

Director George Lucas’s original cut of Star Wars, which was released in 1977, has rarely been shown in public since he produced special editions of the trilogy in the 1990s, complete with new CGI characters and other controversial alterations that fans remain frustrated with.

Examples of some unpopular changes include the CGI addition of the giant slug-like Jabba the Hutt, who originally was not seen on screen until the final film in the original trilogy, 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

Fans also opposed the change to the scene in which Harrison Ford’s Han Solo originally shot the bounty hunter Greedo dead in the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine.

The 1997 special edition version was edited so that Greedo fires first to give Solo more justification for acting in self-defence. But the scene has since undergone further revisions, with the two firing at nearly the same time, then finally at the exact same time.

In 2004, Lucas told the Associated Press that he was “sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it, but I want it to be the way I want it to be”.

Film on Film will present Star Wars exactly as experienced by audiences on its original release on the big screen.

'There are some characters that are great'

The original cut can only be accessed legitimately by means of an out-of-print VHS release or a low resolution DVD bonus feature from 2006.

James Bell, senior curator of fiction at the BFI National Archive, said: “One of the ambitions of the BFI Film on Film Festival is to screen original release prints that transport audiences back to the moment a film was first released.

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He added: “In the case of Star Wars, the festival screening is a unique opportunity to present the film to audiences in exactly the same form as they would have watched it in 1977.”

Some other films that will be screened at the festival include early Stanley Kubrick classics such as Day of the Fight (1951) and The Killing (1956) as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

This year's Film on Film festival is set to take place between 12-15 June at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX.