Iain Batchelor as Captain Jack Absolute in The Rivals. Photograph: Simon Annand
Mushy and predictable, with loosely held together plot lines, a slew of stereotypes and Jennifer Aniston with plenty of ‘issues’ – the romantic comedy is an oft-derided genre.
Struggling rom-com scriptwriters could do worse than head to the Arcola Theatre for Selina Cadell’s revival of Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, for a master class in frolicsome repartee.
The Rivals, set in the fashionable Bath, has all the genre’s regular features – the staid best friend in the sub-plot romance, furious fathers and mooning lovers.
But Sheridan’s characters are so artfully drawn, so full of eccentricity and eloquence, that Dalston’s packed out playhouse sits in thrall throughout this (admittedly rather long) comedy of manners.
Lydia Languish (Jennifer Rainsford) has read too many of the newly popular trashy novels. She has bad-boy syndrome and in a big way. From her frilly boudoir she dreams of a starry- lit elopement with her pauper ensign Beverley and thrills of penniless passion.
Despite the efforts of her aunt Mrs Malaprop (Gemma Jones) – whose muddled meanings coined the word ‘malapropism’ – and her orders to “illiterate him” from her memory, Lydia wants to live like common people.
But the discovery that Beverley is no churchmouse but in fact the extremely eligible, or as her aunt has it ‘illegible’, Jack Absolute (Iain Batchelor) renders Lydia inconsolable. The banality of the words ‘consent’ and ‘vicar’ send her crashing to her chaise-longue with distress.
Two others rivals, the country buffoon Bob Acres and Irish gent Sir Lucius O’ Trigger (Adrian McLoughlin), also compete for Miss Languish’s affections.
Matters are complicated further when the unfortunate O’Trigger is tricked by the not-so-simple Lucy (Hannah Stokely) into courting the antique Mrs Malaprop instead of her niece.
The burgeoning romance between the neurotic Faulkland, played to perfection by a long-faced Adam Jackson-Smith, and his long-suffering Julia (Justine Mitchell) has the audience in stitches.
West End heavyweight Nicholas Le Provost also gives a barnstorming performance as the apoplectic Captain Absolute.
Cadell’s masterstroke is in ramping up the camp. Each gesture is slightly overdone until the characters gently mock their own pretensions.
But rather than this serving to send up the early comedy, the tongue-in-cheek exaggerations improve the joke – in tune with the eighteenth-century predilection for lampoon and satire.
Unlike the characters, Emma Bailey’s modest set commands minimal attention but nevertheless its subtlety – as hand-drawn clouds are winched comically across the stage – is no less refined.
The Rivals at the Arcola is the pineapple of wit – book now to avoid despisement!
The Rivals is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 15 November www.arcolatheatre.com
East Londoner: Ray Winstone. Photgraph: Fergus Greer
Hair whipped back and donning a heavy leather jacket, Ray Winstone stalks film journalist Danny Leigh to the front of a small screen at the Hackney Picturehouse. The room is nowhere near capacity, but members of the actor’s old boxing club have filled a good few seats towards the rear.
As the two sit and settle smoothly into conversation, the atmosphere is understandably hushed – stunned, even. We’ve just sat through Scum (1979), Alan Clarke’s ice-cold and earthy portrait of young life in a borstal prison.
The film, which was remade after the original BBC version was banned two years earlier, was Winstone’s first big- screen role. His bruising performance as reluctant hard-nut Carlin is explosive and utterly convincing, packed with furious emotion.
We join the adolescent rogue as he’s inducted into a brutal regime, where adults beat and bully their young charges into shape – or not, as the case may be. The politics and dynamics are full on and fascinating, with Mick Ford’s delightful veggie inmate, Archer, providing an insightful social commentary. It’s a bleak vision peppered with glum landscapes and even sadder characters – heavy but vital.
“It’s a film really that shows what kids do to other kids and what establishment does to kids and what men do to men, you know?” Winstone says softly, soaking the words in his unmistakably gruff Cockney twang and moving on to explain how he got the part.
“I’d been kicked out of college that day and a lot the kids I was at college with were going up the BBC for an interview, and I went with them – just to say goodbye and have a beer with them after and all that.”
Whilst there, he was persuaded by a pretty receptionist to have a chat with Clarke, who, once their apparently fruitless discussion was over, escorted him to the exit.
“I got the part on the way I walked down the corridor,” he says. “I just really didn’t give a fuck. And so it was nothing to do with any talent because I had none – I had no idea about technique or anything like that. But it just shows you sometimes it pays to be a little bit of a fucker, you know? And it stood me good stead that, for a while.”
One of the reasons for the screening is that the star has recently penned Young Winstone, about his early life in London. Reflecting on his days growing up in Hackney and Plaistow, it looks at how the city has changed since the years soon after the Second World War – “sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.”
“London was a bomb site and it was where we used to play,” he says. “When they was building the rest of Europe they weren’t building England – they weren’t building London.
“But it was all right, I was pretty lucky: my dad worked in the meat market, the fruit market eventually, and we had uncles in the fish market and in the docks, where there was plenty of spillage, so we never went hungry,” he continues.
“But [the book is] about community – it was a community, you know. Then they built flats, then you moved round. You don’t know who your neighbour is anymore. And it’s really about that. But it’s not just about my life… it’s about that generation.”
After asserting that he’s “an Essex boy really,” he goes on to detail his rich family connections to Hackney and the East End, explaining that his father went to school on Lauriston Road and that many relations are scattered around “Vicky Park”. He also spent time as a boy living with his granddad on Well Street – the Frampton Park Estate – when his dad “had the right hump” with him.
He seems to drift into a haze of nostalgia, talking in a slow and fragmented stream of consciousness. Realising that his latest tangent might be going nowhere, he quickly plucks an anecdote from thin air: “In fact, when I was three I was in a push chair and a geezer flashed me by all accounts,” he says. “So I was flashed at an early age.”
After touching on Sundays spent with his cousins at the Landsdowne Club, and how he can’t help but remember his old street bathed in sunlight, the questions turn to Hollywood.
He describes Leonardo DiCaprio, who he worked with on The Departed, as a “smashing kid”, and proceeds to execute an uncanny impersonation of Martin Scorsese. He’s less taken, though, with Jack Nicholson, who’s a “fantastic actor to watch… [But] he does think a lot of himself.”
It’s a criticism you certainly can’t fire at Ray. Humble in the extreme and desperately likeable, he’s something of a working class hero. Contrary to his own self-deprecation, Scum is undeniable evidence of talent by the bucket load.
Slightly hunched, he walks out with his arm around the shoulders of a chum from years back, chattering away about old times.
Young Winstone is published by Canongate RRP: £20 ISBN: 978-1-78211-246-6
Rawduck’s first premises, a café on Amhurst Road, closed rather dramatically in November 2013 after structural damage to the building led to an emergency evacuation and its eventual demolition. It reopened in April on Richmond Road in a larger and airier space with a full kitchen, suggesting that the relocation, despite being harrowing, has wrought some benefits to the restaurant’s scale and ambitions.
Like its sister restaurant Ducksoup, Rawduck puts an emphasis on healthful, seasonal eating and house cured, smoked, and fermented food. Its quirky menu has unusual ingredients that, while enticing, are sometimes needlessly obscure. Thankfully our waiter welcomed questions and recommended dishes. Following her suggestion, we started with a raspberry drinking vinegar: slightly carbonated, tart but not sour, it was a worthy non-alcoholic alternative to wine.
Our dinner consisted of various sharing plates. Fermented sweet white miso carrots were the star of the meal – and cost £2. The miso’s salty richness balanced out the sweetness of the blanched carrots. The “impatient” cucumber pickles that followed were bland by comparison and lacked the punch of a longer brine. A courgette and pomegranate salad with tahini yogurt was beautifully presented and an exemplar of the restaurant’s mission to source the best ingredients.
Buttermilk fried chicken, while expertly done, didn’t stand out, but the restaurant’s signature dish, chopped raw duck, was excellent: marinated in citrus juice with red onion and chilli, it was an elegant take on a ceviche. For pudding we shared a lemon pie. Zesty slices of lemon offset buttery pastry and a healthy dose of clotted cream.
Our bill came in at £20 a head (albeit with no wine), and for the price we felt we’d received a generous selection of inventive dishes that piqued our curiosity in a cosy space that invited us to linger. A welcome addition to the increasingly foodie Hackney Central.
Fish you were here? Ole Hansen prepares fresh smoked salmon in his studio. Photograph: Hansen & Lydersen
When prehistoric Hackney citizens roamed the plashy marshes and meandering water meadows of the Lea Valley they brought home wild fowl and fish, fruits and seeds, and enjoyed a varied but by no means balanced diet.
A good catch meant a glut and much feasting, and a poor one left empty bellies. We soon learned to preserve the fish and meat left after a binge by wind drying, salting and smoking.
Of all foodstuffs that started to go off almost as soon as it was caught, fish was the most vulnerable, so barrels of herrings in salt or brine, cod dried to the consistency of a block of wood, sardines, fried then put in a vinegary pickle, all became commercial staples and much loved fare. Our national dish of fish and chips has its origins here, but that’s another story…
When Lance Forman’s ancestors came to Hackney from Odessa in 1905 and set up a smokery in Ridley Road, Londoners were astonished at the delicacy and melting tenderness of their smoked salmon, made not with heavily salted fish from the Baltic, but fresh wild salmon sourced by the Forman family from Scotland.
From subsistence food to a luxury treat, today their state-of-the-art, high tech smokery, having survived fire, flood, and planning blight (the murky shenanigans of the Olympic committee…), borders on the dubious terrain that once housed the games, and here Scottish salmon are still prepared following traditional methods.
The glitzy décor is new, but the age-old methods survive. It is Lance Forman’s genial combination of entrepreneurial skills and unshakeable idealism that saved his firm when other East End smokeries collapsed in the face of unscrupulous competition.
Of the various cures for which they are renowned Forman’s ‘London Cure’ is perhaps the most characteristic: the fish are salted for a short time, rinsed, drained, and ‘cold’ smoked over oak shavings at a low temperature. The resultant delicate, light flesh is thinly sliced diagonally the length of the fish, and best eaten at once.
Sensitive slicing by hand gives variations in the texture of the flesh, with a better flavour and a less slithery feel than the mechanically cut versions done by mass-producers of inferior products. It is paradoxical that a technique evolved for long-life preservation has today brought us an ephemeral product, with a relatively short shelf life.
‘Farmed salmon’ does not have to be a derogatory term; it all depends on how they are reared and what they feed on. Forget battery hens and calves in crates, and imagine the deep pens through which the cold northern waters surge. And remember that fish have been farmed by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and reared in ponds by medieval monastic communities.
In another corner of Hackney, where its ancient inhabitants once roamed amongst fields and hedgerows, swallowed up only recently in brickfields and then by those rows of no-longer-cheap terraced houses, there lies a hidden network of converted industrial premises and modern mews developments.
Behind the stretch of Church Street facing Clissold Park, there lurks a different kind of smokery; Hansen & Lydersen was founded in 1923 in Norway where traditions of catching and preserving fish go back to prehistoric times.
A small family firm, they were producing high quality smoked salmon using ancient methods. The arrival five years ago in Stoke Newington of the smokery of Ole Hansen, great grandson of the founder, brought a whole new dimension to Hackney’s gastronomic life.
Here, in an obscure studio, Ole, with an inspired combination of imagination, childhood memories and down-to-earth hands-on skills, together with his equally enthusiastic team, are offering us a luxury product.
His fish is farmed in the cold bracing waters of northern Norway. It is prepared and salted within 48 hours at the most of being caught, and lightly smoked for not more than 12 hours using beech and juniper shavings, which impart a distinctive aroma; the beech gives a mild background smokiness and the juniper has a pungent perfume – think the best kind of gin, almost spicy, that lingers on the palate.
The fish, suspended in the drying chamber, swaying voluptuously in the wafting aromas, mellow in the smoke, sometimes soothed, we are told, by riffs and arpeggios from the battered upright piano close by. Ole’s manic business plans are both visionary and practical, so I feel sure that the piano is indeed a source of good vibrations, not just a gimmick.
We can buy the salmon on various of the Hackney street markets, or with advance warning from the smokery. It is awesome to watch the perfectionist preparation, as the fish is trimmed then cut in thick vertical slices towards the skin, giving a variation of flavour and texture through each slice.
This account of two smokeries in Hackney is not a David and Goliath story. Both are on the same side, perfectionists, casting stones and rocks not at each other but by implication at the purveyors of cheap and nasty versions of what should only ever be a luxury product. Best not to think of the ways in which unhealthy farmed fish, none too fresh, can be tarted up with synthetic colouring, salt and sugar to boost water content and hence volume, sprayed with a smoky flavour, and squashed to death in a vacuum pack. Instead save up for a lavish meal.
Forget messing around with canapés, pile it up on the plate. As Oscar Wilde recommended: ‘Enough is as good as a feast; more than enough is even better than a feast’.
Fine smoked salmon needs no recipes, but there are things to do with the trimmings and off-cuts. I weep to see the strip of lush fat from the underbelly get tossed into the waste bin. Sacrilege. If you can cadge some, cut this amazing stuff into little cubes and melt gently in a frying pan, then when the fat is oozing out stir in some beaten eggs and cook lightly, no butter, no milk, just a grating of black pepper. A few trimmings enhance a fish soup. The things to avoid are lemon and cream cheese, both of which add nothing to an already perfect luxury.
A guest at the Angelo Love Hotel in Osaka. Photograph: Native Voice Films
It’s been estimated that not far off three million people drop in at one of Japan’s 37,000-odd ‘love hotels’ every day. These often strangely designed establishments are something of a subversive institution – a designated space for play, fantasy and exploration, where couples can escape the pressures of a rigid social structure.
With unprecedented access behind the scenes at the Angelo Love Hotel in Osaka, filmmakers Hikaru Toda and Phil Cox – of Native Voice Films in Hackney – have spent the last four years working on a documentary that sheds light on this offbeat strand of Japanese culture. The result is Love Hotel, a curious film streaked with beauty and truth.
In many ways – and not just because it’s Japan – it’s like reading Murakami: you’re drawn into a neon-lit sub-reality where the unconscious plays out like real life. But what’s fascinating, and at times easy to forget, is that this is real life. Within the four walls of each individual room is a different world, a slightly tweaked dimension (enhanced by the bizarrely themed décor) in which the narratives are generally rich and engrossing.
But just to be clear, the window that Cox and Toda offer is not about sex or voyeurism: it’s about people.
The characters followed are an intriguing and diverse bunch, with a 40-something married couple and two gay lawyers taking much of the focus. Perhaps most interesting, though, are a divorced couple who come together to share a dance once a week, or the 71-year-old widower who watches porn and writes reflective letters about not being able to write like – ironically – Murakami.
One particular sequence in which a businessman is kitted out in squeaking latex rubber and hung from the ceiling by a young dominatrix demonstrates the directors’ considerably refined artistry.
Just as fascinating, though, are the ins and outs of running the hotel, with a busy backroom staff pulling the strings to keep the ethereal illusion intact. It’s like theatre, or dramatic therapy of some sort.
Having spent hours and hours at a time in the rooms with their subjects, the co-directors have captured some moving moments of confession, desire and frustration. This is tempered by a heavy dollop of humour that, while undeniably entertaining, might occasionally distract from the stark sadness of a situation.
As the film progresses, a political arc emerges concerning the changing laws regarding love hotels, giving the piece the thread it needs to ride through to a successful conclusion. In all it’s a unique, thought provoking and deftly-executed feature, flecked with magic.
Eggs Lincolnshire at Blighty Coffee. Photograph: Anna Niman
Blighty Coffee on Blackstock Road is an artisan coffeehouse that opened in 2013 and is seeking to establish itself as a community hub and event space in the style of early 20th century coffeehouses.
Punters as well as the creatives who rent hot desk space on the floor above are invited to make themselves at home in the large but cosy space, that spans two floors and a garden and has a piano and board games all are welcome to use.
The dominant theme in the décor is postwar England, with pictures of Winston Churchill on the walls and other paraphernalia – if a little at odds with the neighbouring Algerian cafés, it is nevertheless a welcome departure from the minimalist industrial décor that seems to be required of trendy new ventures.
The coffee was excellent: prepared in a third wave style with beans from the always excellent Monmouth roastery, although Blighty also roasts its own beans. Don’t miss the orange zest flavoured cappuccino that tastes like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, or if that’s not to your taste, you can order another one laced with Baileys to sweeten up brunch.
The food menu also takes inspiration from the 1940s and serves up traditional English breakfast fare. We had the Winston (£9), a full English that came with unlimited toast, but was so amply sized that we couldn’t avail ourselves of this feature and preferred to focus on finishing the excellent quality meats.
The Eggs Scotland (£7.50) were essentially a very straightforward salmon benedict, and while decently prepared, the salmon was a little on the cold side and the dish could have used some garnish. On the whole we left full and pleased with our relaxing meal and will definitely stop there next time we’re in the area.
Leave your wallet at home: Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond The Pines. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima
Cinephiles mourning the loss of the Film Shop on Broadway Market may be heartened to learn that London Fields now boasts its own film festival, which is set to take place for ten days starting this weekend.
The London Free Film Festival will see a variety of features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films screened at local venues over ten days, with a special focus on London filmmakers and themes.
There will be a chance to watch 2011 documentary Under The Cranes, a meditation on the multi-cultural history of Hackney by Emma-Louise Williams, who will appear with the poet Michael Rosen for a Q&A session afterwards.
Hackney Attic will be hosting a ‘Ryan Gosling all-dayer’, a triple bill of films starring the so-called hottest man in Hollywood. There is also an evening of fashion shorts planned at the London College of Fashion on Mare Street.
The festival has chosen some unusual local venues, such as Hollywood Springs cinema on Well Street, London Fields Gym and Hackney City Farm.
Best of all, each event will be free to enter. The festival is organised by local volunteers and has been set up by Free Film Festivals, who have previously run free festivals in Peckham and Nunhead, Herne Hill and Camberwell.
London Fields Free Film Festival is at various venues from 17–26 October.
David Baddiel and Erran Baron Cohen. Photograph: Robert Day
A film about a British Muslim who discovers he is Jewish has been made into a musical, on now at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
The Infidel, released in 2010, was created by David Baddiel, who claimed to have written the controversial life-swap comedy in part because “people are terrified about race and religion, especially issues surrounding Muslims and Jews, and when people are terrified, what they really should do is laugh”.
A musical, however, needs more than laughs. Music and – more specifically – songs, are generally required. For that, Baddiel unsurprisingly turned to the man who scored the original film, Erran Baron Cohen.
Baron Cohen, the 46-year-old elder brother of Ali-G and Borat creator Sacha, has had a long career in music as a composer and trumpeter. He has toured the world with his group Zohar, who are signed to Miles Copeland’s Ark 21 label, and wrote scores for Borat and Bruno.
Although writing the film score meant he was already familiar with The Infidel, turning it into a musical was not a case of adapting existing material.
“It’s completely new work, although the central idea is the same and some of the funny scenes we have kept. We’ve tried to emphasise some different aspects that weren’t really explored in the movie.”
The film makes great hay at lampooning cultural and religious differences, but while there are touches of Jewish and Arabic influences in the music, Baron Cohen insists that’s “not the thrust of it”.
“The basic set-up is a rock band and the music is not really ‘ethnic’ in any way,” Baron Cohen explains. “The main character is Muslim but he’s a guy who listens to rock music so why wouldn’t he be singing in that way as well?
“He’s friends with a Jewish taxi driver who doesn’t know much about Judaism though he is Jewish. He’s just a normal guy who lives in London. It’s quite a London story and part of it is that it’s not the stereotypical thing, we felt we didn’t need too much of that influence musically in the style.”
With songs for the musical including one entitled ‘Sexy Burka’ and another called ‘Put a Fatwa On it’, it’s clear David Baddiel, who wrote the song lyrics as well as the script, doesn’t suffer from over caution.
“They sound quite out there but the songs are actually very positive,” says Baron Cohen. “We have a very positive view of a friendship between a Muslim guy and Jewish guy as we look at the similarities and differences between two religions and identities.”
Although not a novice songwriter, Baron Cohen has more experience as a composer for film. Baddiel, however, rates Baron Cohen’s melodic talents so highly that he suspects he might have been doing the “wrong thing” in his career to date.
“It’s an interesting point,” says Baron Cohen, diplomatically. “I think it is a compliment though it’s somehow slightly depressing. I’ve done lots of things and I’ve been lucky that the career keeps moving in a direction that I don’t always expect. I’d certainly love to write more musicals so I suppose what me and David will have to do is to write another one so that I’m not wasting any more time.”
The Infidel – The Musical is at Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN www.stratfordeast.com
London Fashion Week SS15 showcased a bounty of new and emerging design talent, who brought a heavy dose of daring and DIY to the landscape of British fashion. New names such as Faustine Steinmetz and Charlie May, and young brands including Louise Alsop and Claire Barrow dominated the schedule. The atmosphere and aesthetic emerging for SS15 was about fun and fantasy, but also craft and technical innovation, and these designers proved that they had it all, shaping what British fashion is today.
Kult Domini
East-London based footwear label Kult Domini presented Babylonia, their aptly named SS15 collection inspired by the earth and its minerals. Vegetable dyed leathers in midnight blue and dusky pink were used for the uppers on shoes, along with chlorophyll-like cellular prints and crocodile skin textures. The label, which has gained recognition for its wooden stacked heel and open-back brogue, have the shoes produced in Italy using fine Italian leather to ensure quality. But this is not precious footwear, Kult Domini shoes are made for pacing the pavements.
Look out for: The Kult Domini croc platform pool slider.
Faustine Steinmetz
Denim and ready-to-wear designer Faustine Steinmetz deconstructed the American classic and any conventional notion of it in her SS15 collection, which featured hand-woven and hand-dyed jackets and jeans in ethereal matted threads and puckered fabrics. Washed out denim tones and iridescent silver hues made for a light otherworldly aesthetic. The designer, who works on handlooms in her East London studio, referenced the mega couture houses of her native Paris through playful branding on pens, sweets and plinths that read ‘Faustine Steinmetz – Whitechapel’.
Look out for: Security tag jewellery in scuffed silver, made in collaboration with jewellery label Niomo.
Charlie May
Charlie May presented a collection of wearable loose-fit trousers and drop-shouldered T-shirts in a palette of white, the softest blue and camel brown. Inspired by her upbringing on the Devon coastline, the sea breeze is almost palpable in the botanical-print tops and easy sliders, created in collaboration with Adidas.
Look out for: May’s painterly leaf print tops.
Minki Cheng
Graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2012, Minki Cheng’s first full collection, for SS15, was made up of simple, clean jackets and dresses with pleating and sheer panels, in charcoal, black and navy. Using neon rubber, to create contours on soft organza slip dresses, brought an interesting contradiction in surface texture.
Look out for: Minki Cheng’s drop pleated sleeveless dresses.
Claire Barrow
Emerging designer Claire Barrow used her sci-fi influenced vision of the future, involving deadly viruses and medical wonder women, as the inspiration behind her SS15 collection. Disregarding the norms of warm-weather wear, Barrow adopted her gothic DIY aesthetic to create leather vests and silk dresses depicting cavemen-style paintings of Chagall cats with human faces and other unidentified creatures.
Look out for: Barrow’s cat-adorned zip-up biker vests.
Ten years of supporting artists: documentary 72-82 about arts organisation ACME
London’s expansive and diverse cultural landscape has been inspiring filmmakers for decades. The programme of the 58th London Film Festival is no exception, with its twelve-day programme featuring more than ninety UK productions, several of which take place in the East End.
Snow in Paradise is centred on the real life experiences of co-writer and co-star Martin Askew, a white, working class Hoxton boy who turned his back on his gangland roots to convert to Islam in 2001.
Following a drug deal gone wrong, the central character, played by Frederick Schmidt, is forced to deal with the consequences amidst the changing landscape of the East End’s underground culture. A directorial debut for accomplished editor Andrew Hulme, it was nominated for two awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Hulme explains his desire to depict “a guy who embraces what is, in the Western World, quite a castigated religion. I felt that Islam is misportrayed in the media. People are really bored with seeing Muslims as terrorists. We wanted to be a little bit more complex and portray a different side.”
William Raban, one of Britain’s leading experimental filmmakers, returns with 72-82, an hour-long feature documenting the first decade of the arts organisation ACME. Working exclusively with archive material from ACME, it shows the crucial impact the organisation had in supporting and providing housing for many London artists, including Richard Deacon and Helen Chadwick.
In addition to music from David Cunningham, the archive footage is brought to life by voices of the artists involved. The director will be taking part in a post-screening Q&A at the BFI Southbank on 13 October at 9pm.
Cinemas in Hackney will be taking part in the festival, including the Hackney Picturehouse, Rich Mix and the Rio cinema. For the full programme and to book tickets see below.
