FOCUS ON THE DOCUMENTARY

New Release

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

2022 marks the 100-year anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature. A century on, Hitchcock remains one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. But how does his vast body of work and legacy hold up in today’s society?

Mon 14 Aug 16:00 – Auditorium

Wed 23 Aug 18:00 – Studio

Mark Cousins, the award-winning filmmaker behind ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey,’ ‘The Eyes of Orson Welles’ and ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation,’ tackles this question and looks at the auteur with a new and radical approach: through the use of the auteur’s own voice. As Hitchcock rewatches his films, we are taken on an odyssey through his vast career – his vivid silent films, the legendary films of the 1950s and 60s and his later works – in playful and revealing ways.

UK 2022 MARK COUSINS 120M

Preview

A Compassionate Spy

Steve James’s engrossing documentary tells the story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, a young physicist who leaked nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in order to protect the future of mankind.

Ted Hall was recruited to join the Manhattan Project when he was still a teenager. A brilliant young physicist, Ted went to Los Alamos with no clue as to what he would be working on, but when he learned the nature of the weapon being designed, he began to worry that if only the United States possessed nuclear technology, the post-war risks might be great. It was only 1944, but Ted Hall was already imagining the potential for a nuclear holocaust after Germany’s inevitable surrender, so he began to pass information – significant details about the implosion bomb later known as “Fat Man” –to the Soviet Union. After the war, he met and married fellow University of Chicago student Joan. Then, as the Cold War escalated and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg stoked national paranoia, the FBI started investigating and the family’s life changed forever. Much of the film is illustrated through interviews with Joan, who remains feisty, introspective and largely unapologetic about what she views through the prism of a multi-decade love story. The film borrows the look and feel of a historical espionage thriller and builds some momentum and moral complexity along the way, but it finds its real potency as a generational family drama.

USA 2022 STEVE JAMES 102M

Tue 15 Aug 18:30 – Auditorium

Wed 16 Aug 14:00 – Auditorium

Our thanks to Autlook Films for this screening.

Mon 14 Aug 16:00 – Studio (inc Intro)

Tue 15 Aug 13:15 – Pic Palace Booking Ref

Preview A TRIP TO TETLAPAYAC

An essay film by Ian Christie and Chiemi Shimada about Eisenstein’s 1931 visit to Mexico. “In 2012, I managed to visit and film Hacienda Tetlapayac, where Eisenstein spent much of 1931, frantically reading and writing as well as filming. Unexpectedly, Tetlapayac remains just as it appears in Eisenstein and Tisse’s footage, having served as a location for a surprising range of films, as we now know. Our film draws on these, following the idiosyncratic twists and turns in Eisenstein’s memoir ‘Beyond the Stars’. Like this, it has a large cast of characters and references that runs from Douglas Fairbanks as the first screen Zorro, stirring the young Sergei’s interest in cinema, up to Antonio Banderas as his most recent incarnation. Other guest appearances include Leon Trotsky, Spencer Tracy, Serge Daney and Derek Jarman, filming his ‘Imagining October’ in Moscow with Peter Wollen, just before the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika”. – Ian Christie

UK/JAPAN

2023 IAN CHRISTIE & CHIEMI

SHIMADA 50M

We welcome Ian Christie to introduce the film.

UK Premiere AFGHANISTAN

A timely new documentary chronicles

James Glancy, a British solder’s return to Afghanistan, just as US. troops pulled out of the country amid a Taliban takeover. James Glancy, a filmmaker and former British Royal Marine commando who was decorated for his actions in combat, returns to Afghanistan with a small, handpicked team to help him answer the question that has haunted him for ten years. Was it worth it? Dramatically, midway through filming, President Joe Biden announces that the US will be pulling troops out by 9/11, starting a Taliban offensive that leads to the dramatic fall of the Afghanistan Government, amidst chaotic evacuation scenes in Kabul, as American forces withdraw. “The US. announced their complete withdrawal and we found ourselves in a war-torn country that was collapsing around us. The Taliban took complete control, and our own mission changed from filming to helping Afghan friends evacuate from certain death. The Taliban symbolically announced their new government on September 11, 2021, exactly twenty years after the attack on the World Trade Centre, and we are now some of the last people to document life in the old Afghanistan and the events that lead to the return of the Taliban”. – James Glancy.

UK 2023 JAMES GLANCY / MARTY STALKER 110M

We are delighted to welcome James Clancy to introduce his film followed by a Q&A after the screening.

Fri 18 Aug 18:00 – Auditorium (plus Q&A)

Our thanks to Westend Films UK for this screening.