Author: Alice

An intimate film profile of Belfast poet Michael Longley, offering insights into his work, friendships, working process, the places that have inspired him and his relationship with his wife Edna. Broadcast 12 February 2024 on BBC ONE NI and available now on BBC iPlayer Executive Producer DERMOT LAVERYProducers MICHAEL HEWITT and MARTIN ROSENBAUM Film Editor […]

Marina Abramovic is the reigning queen of performance art. She invites Alan Yentob into her home, opens up her enormous personal archive and travels back to her birthplace, Belgrade. Her early, provocative work was once dismissed, but today thousands go to see her perform pieces that can last for weeks, even months at a time. […]

Shot over five years leading to its 250th anniversary, this film is an intimate portrait of one of Britain’s most enduring cultural institutions. With unique access, the documentary illuminates the inner workings of the Royal Academy of Arts and reveals how it embraces the challenge of balancing tradition and innovation. Opening to the public in […]

Why does the poet who began as the golden boy of the 1930s and ended up as the craggy-faced laureate-we-never-had have a greater hold on our imaginations than ever before? Thirty-five years after his BBC film The Auden Landscape, director Adam Low returns to the poet and his work. Following Auden’s surges of popularity from […]

Inspired by his acerbic and often hilarious diaries, this documentary shows Alan Bennett as he has never been seen before. The film follows Bennett to New York, the scene of his early triumph in Beyond the Fringe, to his community library in Primrose Hill which, he despairs, some would rather see turned into a pizza […]

Alan Yentob joins South African artist William Kentridge as he prepares an epic frieze along the banks of the river Tiber in Rome. Alan visits him in his hometown of Johannesburg, the inspiration for the magical hand-drawn animated films he calls “drawings for projection”. Brought up under apartheid, Kentridge has witnessed the fragile transition to […]

Love is All takes us on a journey through the Twentieth century, exploring love and courtship on screen in a century of unprecedented social upheaval. From the very first kisses ever caught on film, through the disruption of war, to the birth of youth culture, gay liberation and free love, we follow courting couples flirting […]

The sequel to The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema sees the reunion of infamous philosopher Slavoj Žižek with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, now using their inventive interpretation of moving pictures to examine ideology – the collective fantasies that shape our beliefs and practices.