Tag: UK

March 4, 2024 / Experimental

Remember Me is a dark, obsessive and emotive treatise on death. Its aim is to explore the intimate, personal and often secret relationships that people have with mortality and loss. The film uses original and found footage to capture the complex web of emotions which surround death and to create a passionate journey through difficult private territories.

March 3, 2024 / Theatre

Peter Sallis is the escaped convict with a fetish for women’s underwear, hiding out in a remote Welsh cottage on a snowy night. Peter Vaughan is the investigating policeman. But all is not as it seems. Tense, unusual and largely forgotten TV play from 1975, due to it only being screened regionally.

March 3, 2024 / Documentary

Documentary on history and culture of the gypsy communities worldwide. Part One takes us on a search for the lost gypsy tribes of Egypt, up the Nile to the ancient town of Luxor in the shadow of the great Pharaoh’s tombs. Along the way, we meet dancing girls and acrobats, magicians, fortune-tellers and even mystics performing an exorcism. Part Two is a penetrating, provocative tour of a fabled people’s existence. It reveals the prejudice they still face daily and which they combat with the lyrics and music they have carried and adapted on their long migrations.

February 11, 2024 / Documentary

This television essay from 1985 was written by Leonard Bernstein to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth. Recorded in Israel, Vienna and later in London, it is punctuated by biographical interludes and illustrated by musical examples drawn from the cycle of Mahler’s works recorded by Bernstein. Bernstein talks, plays and conducts various orchestras (Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Wiener Philharmoniker) and soloists (Janet Baker, Christa Ludwig, Edith Mathis, Lucia Popp, Walton Groenroos) in performances spanning 17 years.

February 11, 2024 / Drama

Dramatisation of the Bakiga people’s attempt to cultivate the Kigezi district of Uganda, region inhabited by Pygmies. Jonathan, educated clerk, son of the village’s chief, goes along with other men’s of the village to build the new farms. Injured in a movement of buffaloes, he is helped by some Pygmies villagers with who he becomes friends. When returning to his people’s settlement, his peers don’t see these new acquaintances in a favorable light.

February 11, 2024 / War

Daniel Thatcher is an American sergeant serving with a British tank corps in North Africa. He and most of his unit are captured by the Germans, who learn his identity as a man who once tried to assassinate Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. Thatcher’s wife was killed in the concentration camps, and now, after his failed attempt to kill the Nazi leader, Thatcher is a real prize for his captors. But Thatcher prefers not to go back to Germany as a prize, so he leads his fellow tankers in an escape attempt.

December 25, 2023 / Mini-Series

Between 1798 and 1812, the wild, romantic country of the English Lake District saw an intense concentrated flowering of literary genius. At its centre was the poet William Wordsworth, born in the region, who lived there almost all his life with his beloved sister Dorothy. Around him, as the genius of the age, gathered other poets and writers – Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. This idiosyncratic two-part mini-series, conceived by acclaimed director Ken Russell, concentrates on the relationship between William and Dorothy, and the battle with laudanum faced by Coleridge.

December 25, 2023 / Documentary

DON’T SHOOT THE COMPOSER is far from an ordinary profile of Georges Delerue. It also serves as a calling card for Ken Russell, whose work would define the 1970s as Delerue’s did in the 1960s. It begins with a sly work of pastiche, parodying the conventions of French noir. It goes onto encompass slapstick, verité scenes of the Delerue family and a harrowing montage of the Vietnam War. This eclectic approach gives us a sense of the different facets of Delerue’s life- his love of cinema, his home life, his work ethic. It also prefigures Russell’s feature length biopics of Mahler and Liszt, though in a more modest- and lucid- fashion.