Category: Recent Productions
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MICHAEL LONGLEY Where Poems Come From
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 […]
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T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
Ralph Fiennes’s exquisite performance of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece is dynamically translated from stage to screen by director Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology). During the early days of COVID, the Oscar® nominee set himself the challenge of committing Four Quartets to memory, and in 2021 he brought it to the […]
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James Joyce’s Ulysses
A new feature length documentary to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece. Ulysses is the most notorious novel of the 20th century. Banned in the USA for obscenity in 1920 it was finally printed in Paris in 1922 by an American woman who had never published a book before. A […]
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Artificial Things
In this award-winning dance film, director Sophie Fiennes collaborates with choreographer Lucy Bennett to reimagine Stopgap Dance Company’s stage production Artificial Things. Filmed on 16mm in a derelict suburban shopping mall and featuring an ensemble of disabled and non-disabled dancers, the piece explores human interdependence, strength and vulnerability. Dancers Amy Butler, Laura Jones, Chris Pavia, […]
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Marina Abramovic: The Ugly Duckling
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. […]
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Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens
Born into a farming family in rural Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney became the finest poet of his generation and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, but his career coincided with one of the bloodiest political upheavals of the 20th century, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Six years after Heaney’s death in 2013, […]
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The Private Life of the Royal Academy
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 […]
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Stop All the Clocks: WH Auden in an Age of Anxiety
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 […]
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Alan Bennett’s Diaries
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 […]
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The Triumphs and Laments of William Kentridge
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 […]