East End Review

Tag: Hackney Picturehouse

Discovering the long lost cinemas of Hackney

The Rio Cinema in 1985

More films are probably watched in the current era than at any other time in movie history – the majority on TV screens, computers, tablets and even mobile phones.

But to experience the splendour of cinema on the big screen there are only two places in Hackney: the Rio on Kingsland High Street and Hackney Picturehouse on Mare Street.

This wasn’t always the case. Over 60 cinemas have existed at one time or another within Hackney, and although all 60 were never in operation at the same time, there were around 30 cinemas operating in the golden years between 1920 and 1950. It is difficult to imagine stepping out onto Kingsland Road or Mare Street on a Saturday night and having 30 cinemas from which to choose!

Many of the Hackney cinemas opened during a flurry of entrepreneurial activity just before the First World War. There were extraordinary profits to be made; it was like a gold rush and numerous speculators and opportunists were all trying to get in on the cinema act. Film historian Luke McKernan called it “a phase of greedy speculation in cinema building”, with 52 cinemas established in Hackney in seven years, between 1907 and 1914.

Above: Hackney Picture Palace, around 1940. The cinema first opened in 1914. Below: the site of the former cinema on Mare Street today

Above: Hackney Pavilion on Mare Street circa 1960. The cinema opened in 1914. Below: The site of the former cinema. which is now a bank, today

Some were converted shops, chapels, churches and skating rinks, whilst others were struggling theatres and music halls eager to boost audiences cash in on the phenomenon of moving pictures by installing screens and projectors. Still more were new, purpose-built cinemas. Although some closed down after a few years (their owners seemingly took the money and run), there was another flurry of cinema activity in the 1930s, when six luxurious ‘super’ cinemas were opened, with elegant art deco architecture and lavish interiors.

The Odeon on 211 Hackney Road, which later became a Mecca Bingo. Below: the same site, which is set to become flats, in 2016

Above: The ABC (formerly Regal) on Mare Street in 1970. Below: site of the former cinema today

These were the Regent (later renamed the Odeon) in Stamford Hill, the Regal (later the ABC) on Mare Street, the Savoy on Stoke Newington Road (later also an ABC), the Odeon on Hackney Road, the Ritz (again renamed the ABC) in Stamford Hill and finally the Odeon Dalston, along Kingsland Road, close to Dalston Junction. With gigantic interiors and massive screens, Hackney cinemagoers could wallow in the dark in warmth and comfort as the films unspooled.

Above: The Regent in Stamford Hill, which opened in 1929. Below: Sainsbury’s, which occupies the same site today

It is generally thought that the decline in cinema attendance in the 1950s was the result of the boom in television (the birth in fact of electronic home entertainment), but this is only part of the story.

Bombing during the Second World War had destroyed over a million buildings in London, and left 1.2 million Londoners homeless. As families moved to new towns such as Stevenage, Harlow, Hatfield and Basildon, communities broke up and traditional work and leisure patterns eroded. Cinema-going and many other pursuits were abandoned or displaced. By 1970 there were just nine cinemas in Hackney and by 1980 only three remained. When I left the Rio in 1989, it was down to one: the Rio was the only cinema still operating in the borough. But again leisure patterns have changed, and that number has now doubled.

Today there are campaigns and plans to restore both the Clapton Cinematograph Theatre (the Kenning Hall cinema) and the Castle in Brooksbys Walk. If successful, an additional two cinema venues in the borough will mean that the opportunities for Hackney residents to see films on the big screen will have doubled yet again!

The accompanying pictures show some of Hackney’s glorious cinemas; how they once looked, and how the sites look now. If you have any memories of cinemas and cinema-going in Hackney, leave a message in the comments below.

This article is based on a talk given to the Friends of Hackney Archives on 7 September 2016.

Photo credits: Hackney Archives, Cinema Theatres Association, Cinema Treasures

For further information about the Clapton Cinematograph Theatre campaign, visit saveourcinema.org/ and for the Castle Cinema see kickstarter.com/projects/pillowcinema/revive-the-castle-cinema

ABC cinema (formerly Savoy) on Stoke Newington Road in 1963. Below: Efes snooker club, which operates on the same site today

Above: Coliseum cinema at 31-33 Stoke Newington Road in 1970. Below: the same site 15 years on in 1985

Odeon Dalston on Stamford Road in 1948. Below: the site today

Above: The 1928 film Why Sailors Go Wrong plays at Stamford Hill Cinema. Below: Asda, on the site of the cinema today

October 28, 2016
Action! Hackney Picturehouse staff to strike over cinema’s refusal to pay London Living Wage

Living Wage campaigners protesting outside Hackney Picturehouse in 2014

Disgruntled Hackney Picturehouse staff are set to down tools this Saturday in protest against the cinema’s refusal to pay them the London Living Wage.

They are demanding the Mare Street cinema ups staff wages to at least £9.40 an hour, a figure independently calculated as the basic cost of living in the capital.

The current rate of pay for front-of-house Picturehouse staff in London is £8.77 an hour plus £1 commission for every membership sold or renewed.

The cinema workers are also calling on Picturehouse to grant “adequate sick pay, maternity and paternity pay” as well as recognition of their chosen trade union.

This Saturday the strikers will be demonstrating outside Hackney Town Hall in a programme consisting of music and speeches, with “generally excellent vibes” promised.

Members of The Ritzy Living Wage campaign will be there in solidarity, after they last week disrupted the BFI London Film Festival in a march on central London.

Staff at the Ritzy have already managed to secure a higher wage than employees at other Picturehouse cinemas, with those working front-of-house receiving a flat rate of £9.10 an hour.

Both cinemas are part of the Picturehouse cinema chain – owned by screen giant Cineworld – which posted after tax profits of £81.3 million during 2015.

Ritzy staff are represented by media and entertainment union Bectu, whereas representation in other Picturehouse cinemas, including Hackney, is provided by the Picturehouse staff Forum.

The Forum is a collective bargaining unit set up by Picturehouse Cinemas that the strikers argue lacks the independence of their preferred union, Bectu.

A statement on the A Living Wage for Hackney Picturehouse Staff campaign page read: “Cineworld/Picturehouse is a company that can easily afford to become a living wage employer and still run a massive profit. It is a company that can easily afford to give a pay rise which would greatly improve the health of its workers.

“If they won’t give it to us then we are going take it.”

Alisdair Cairns, a staff member at Hackney Picturehouse and a Bectu representative, told the Hackney Citizen: “After the Ritzy workers’ strikes in 2014, it became clear to us at Hackney that we had the power to change a situation that was so obviously wrong.

“We’ve worked hard to get to where we are now. We hope by joining forces with the Ritzy we can inspire not just other Picturehouse workers or other cinema workers, but people being paid poverty wages everywhere to take action. Everyone deserves a wage that is enough to live on.

Picturehouse management have refused to pay us Living Wage, they have refused to recognise our chosen trade union, and they have refused even to meet with us to discuss these matters.

Regrettably, we have been left with no option but to go on strike.”

But in a statement, a spokesperson for Hackney Picturehouse pointed out that the decision to strike was taken by a minority of staff.

“We negotiate pay rates each year with the Forum and negotiations for 2017 have not yet started. We are therefore disappointed by the decision of a minority of staff, 26 out of 82, who voted for strike action on Saturday 15 October,” the spokesperson said.

“Increases in pay for front of house people in Picturehouse Cinemas have far outstripped inflation over the last three years.

“Our staff are hugely important to us, we pay fair wages and have a wide range of benefits within a good working environment.”

At the UK premiere last month of his new film, I, Daniel Blake, director Ken Loach threw his weight behind the strikers.

He said: “Picturehouse is owned by Cineworld which is a big multinational corporation. They make fortunes. The idea that they pay starvation wages because they can get people who are desperate for work is absolutely shocking.”

It will not the first time that Hackney Picturehouse has been in the firing line over failure to pay the London Living Wage.

In June 2014, footballing legend Eric Cantona, who was in Hackney for a film screening and Q&A, lent his support to strikers outside the cinema, and the following Christmas the cinema was awarded a ‘Scrooge of the Year’ award by London Living Wage campaigners.

The London Living Wage, which is set independently and updated annually, recommends businesses pay London workers £9.40 per hour and is calculated according to the basic cost of living in the capital.

October 12, 2016
Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest: this year’s programme announced

Check It, a documentary about a queer street gang in Washington D.C. screens at Fringe! in November

The travails of the world’s only documented gay street gang, the daily life of a ‘third gender’ family in India and some sexy and shocking short films are set to hit East London’s screens at the Fringe! Film and Arts Fest next month.

The annual queer arts festival was launched in 2011 and has become a mainstay of East London’s cultural calendar.

Cinemas, art galleries, pop-up venues and basement clubs are to host a raft of film screenings during November alongside a programme of experimental art, workshops, interactive walks and parties.

The grand opening of this year’s programme is on 15 November at the Rio with Viva, the story of a hairdresser in Havana who works at a drag cabaret club to make ends meet but has dreams of stardom.

Check It, at the Institute of Light, is a documentary about the Washington D.C street gang of the same name (apparently the only documented queer gang in the world) and their struggles to claw their way out of gang life through the unlikely avenue of fashion.

Shorts supply: Natural Instincts is a series of short films designed to shock and arouse in equal measure

Other film highlights include Guru: A Hijra Family, a moving portrait of the daily life of a family of transgender women in India known as hijras, commonly referred to as ‘the third gender’.

A series of shorts tackling the theme of being young and in love and will, according to the programme “resonate like the first time”. Whilst another, Natural Instincts, veers towards the explicit, featuring depictions of spanking and light bondage.

Away from the films, spoken word night Queer’Say will see broadcaster and comedian Rose Wilby host performances by three acclaimed LGBT poets and the drag performer and dominatrix Holestar will be hosting a BDSM workshop and fetish party.

Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest
15–29 November
various East London venues

For more information and the full programme, see here.

Still from Viva, which opens the festival at the Rio Cinema next month

October 6, 2016
Blue Pen, film preview: Breaking the silence

Dorothy Lawrence as Sapper Dennis Smith.

A female journalist who disguised herself as a soldier and travelled to the front on a bicycle during the First World War is the inspiration for a film premiering next month at Hackney Picturehouse.

Blue Pen focuses on ten women journalists whose voices have been silenced through censorship, confinement in institutions and abuse.

Although largely set in the present day, the film’s title refers to the wartime government’s practice of censoring letters and reports from the front.

“I was considering the number of women journalists who are disappeared and executed to this day,” says Julie McNamara, the artistic director of Hackney-based theatre company Vital Xposure.

“So we began to make an experimental short film looking at censorship and blue pen, and Dorothy Lawrence’s story was the springboard.”

When the war broke out, Dorothy Lawrence was 19-year-old aspiring journalist brought up in the care of the church by a guardian whom she later claimed had raped her.

Although very few journalists were allowed to the front Lawrence felt she had every right to report on the war, and – in the era of the suffragettes – believed there was nothing a woman couldn’t do.

“She got the boat to Calais, bought a bicycle and then cycled to the front line,” says McNamara.

“Everyone she met along the way thought it was a jolly jape and that she’d never make it.”

Arrested by French police two miles short of the front line, she was ordered to turn back. Then in Paris she befriended a group of soldiers in a café. She persuaded them to smuggle her a uniform piece by piece and teach her how to march.

Lawrence arrived at the front in perfect disguise and enlisted under the name Sapper (Private) Dennis Smith. But two weeks later a young soldier wanting to earn his stripes “dobbed her in it”.

“All hell was let loose. She was investigated and of course they suspected she was a spy. Then they thought she was a ‘camp follower’, the term they used for legalised prostitutes working on the front line.”

The silencing of Dorothy Lawrence took various forms. Her writings were heavily censored, to the extent that she was never taken seriously. She was also threatened with court martial (even though women couldn’t serve in the armed forces) and placed in a nunnery in France, before being escorted back to Britain.

By 1925, Lawrence’s dreams of Fleet Street looked increasingly remote. Her heavily censored book Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier flopped commercially, and after confiding to a doctor that her church guardian has raped her she was taken into care and later deemed insane.

She was committed first to the London County Mental Hospital and then institutionalised at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Friern Barnet. She died at Friern Hospital in 1964 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in New Southgate Cemetery.

“Blue Pen is more an art film than anything else and is not a dramatic film,” says McNamara.

“It begins with truth of Dorothy Lawrence’s story and creates in the audience’s mind an atmosphere of Dorothy Lawrence’s interrogation and what became of her.

“It then moves on to give ten names from the last decade who have each been disappeared, the majority executed, and so the final question you’re left with is: what is it with the dangerousness of women telling the truth?”

Alongside the premiere of Blue Pen, the launch will also include a screening of Emma Humphreys the Legacy, a documentary short about a teenage sex worker who spent ten years behind bars for killing her boyfriend and pimp, whose case eventually changed the law for those in abusive relationships who kill.

There will also be a panel discussion and live music from Lorraine Jordan, a singer-songwriter who wrote Anna’s Song, a tribute to assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Blue Pen launch event
6 September
The Attic, Hackney Picturehouse
270 Mare Street
E8 1HE
picturehouses.com

August 24, 2016
London Short Film Festival: what’s on out East

Seeing double: Anamaria Marinca in Bootstrapped, a short film by Tony Grisoni playing at the ICA on 10 January as part of the London Short Film Festival

Films about peer pressure, relationships gone wrong and cats are to feature at the London Short Film Festival, returning this month for its 13th edition.

Hackney Picturehouse, the Ace Hotel Shoreditch and the Round Chapel in Lower Clapton are host venues for the festival, which aims to offer a snapshot of contemporary Britain in the most confrontational of terms.

Fucked Up Love (Hackney Picturehouse, 9 January) is a selection of shorts focusing on extra-marital affairs, sex games, prostitution and misread moments, from a story of a couple trying to take a picture they both agree on, told through the lens of a photo booth, to a short in which an act of animal cruelty creates a schism in a couple’s relationship.

There’s a focus on groups of people, with programmes about motherhood, lonely men and peer pressure amongst urban youth. And with the refugee crisis still very much in the spotlight, a programme of shorts entitled Movement: Refugee and Migrant examines perceptions of immigration and the grim realities many immigrants face.

One programme likely to pull in crowds has a feline focus. Cats&Cats&Cats is a celebration of the best in classic and contemporary cat cinema, to be held at the Round Chapel on 14 January. A live score by psychedelic three-piece Stealing Sheep will accompany some classic mog-centred shorts such as Private Life of a Cat (US, 1949), Cat’s Cradle (US, 1959), Jayne Parker’s The Cat and the Woman: a Cautionary Tale (UK, 1982), as well as three new cat films specially commissioned for the festival.

Films from around the world make up an unprecedented number of submissions – nearly 2,000 in total – with Bootstrapped, the latest short by award-winning screenwriter Tony Grisoni, the pick among the many offerings by local filmmakers.

London Short Film Festival
8–17 January 2016
http://shortfilms.org.uk

January 5, 2016
Urban montage: Charlotte Ginsborg’s Melior Street

Melior Street

Charlotte Ginsborg’s Melior Street takes elements of documentary, performance and auteurship and stirs them together to produce an intriguing study of a place in perpetual flux.

The film was recently screened at Hackney Picturehouse, and was followed by a talk with the director and Emeritus Professor Ken Worpole, an expert in East London architecture and sociology.

Gaping like a canyon on the south side of London Bridge, the eponymous road – which has already changed significantly since the film’s original, pre-Shard release in 2011 – is composed of a ragtag mix of architecture.

Amongst towering glass facades, there’s a Catholic church, a homeless centre, a community garden, a banking college and an immigration office. From these locations, and others, Ginsborg pulls together a cast of real people and delivers a montage of varying experience and diverse psychologies.

Opening to a sequence of everyday urban images and a frantic strings accompaniment, the piece instantly calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s classic Man with a Movie Camera. Composer Gabriel Prokofiev, who heads a Hackney-based contemporary classical music label, has contributed a mesmerising score that perfectly complements Ginsborg’s artistry.

From then on, there’s a lot more to admire in the work. The photography is exquisite and the director’s creative approach to portraying a deeply fragmented – and fragmenting – social space is very impressive. As well exploring her chosen landscape using traditional documentary methods, she incorporates a series of odd, well-executed dramatic constructions and a bizarre use of song.

Taking her contributors’ words, Ginsborg pieces together tracks that are then performed by the characters; the film becomes at once a musical, a drama, a documentary and a topographical study. Such self-reflexive formal flourishes effectively – and provocatively – call into question the usefulness of drawing distinct lines between fiction and the real.

Beyond stylistic technique, the film is very much about discussion and sharing stories, in the tradition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – the procession in which, coincidentally, sets off from Southwark. The talk in the piece focuses a lot on community, belonging and identity.

While Ginsborg’s one-on-one interviews are always interesting and sometimes surprising, the conversations she facilitates between her characters can feel laboured, even cumbersome. Her concern with the authoring role of the director becomes, at times, a touch too pronounced and the dialogue suffers as a result.

But this small criticism mustn’t take away from the film’s considerable merit. Something of Melior Street feels like lifting the red rock of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and peering into the shadows beneath. It’s a bold reflection of chaos, creativity and the transience of city life, and it’s well worth a watch for anyone interested in the psychogeography of London.

ow.ly/QfKPN

August 11, 2015
Jem Cohen: ‘By some standards I’m kind of invisible’

Portrait of Jem Cohen

In a small screen at the back of the Whitechapel Gallery, a group of keen cinephiles awaits the address of Jem Cohen, a veteran New York-based filmmaker who has made more than 70 idiosyncratic works over three fruitful decades on the job. It’s an early part of a two-month retrospective entitled Compass and Magnet, with events also taking place at the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse.

Cohen has produced diary films, city portraits, essay films and collaborated with an extraordinary list of musicians – crossing and blending disciplines with pioneering spirit. On this occasion he’s introducing Museum Hours, perhaps his most accessible and well-known work to date.

“You can walk into a museum and in its way it can miss,” he tells us. “Something has to come together, things have to meet…”

And they do. The film is a subtle and moving expression of enormous ambition. Ideas about time, image, memory, art, artefact, displacement, friendship, experience, history and much more, are hung on a sweet narrative thread that runs through the corridors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and out into the streets of Vienna.

The following evening, Cohen takes leave of an East End pub to chat for an hour. He tells me more about the film: “It refuses to follow certain rules about what a narrative is and how a narrative is supposed to function, and it insists that the environment, the locations, the ideas and the characters are all equally important.”

This kind of approach is indicative of Cohen’s dedication to making films that don’t lock into one specific form; Museum Hours is particularly interesting in this regard.

Arriving in an unfamiliar city to tend the bedside of a dying cousin, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) is comforted by a chance meeting with a kind museum attendant (Bobby Sommer). One would be forgiven for expecting a romance, but as the lure of familiar storytelling takes hold, Cohen quickly pulls it away and the piece shatters into something far more interesting: a strange hybrid of documentary and fiction that’s both affecting and real.

Those familiar with Cohen’s wider body of work will recognise the importance of music, which is heavily hinted at in the casting of musician O’Hara, whose character sings quietly but crucially.

Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours in Vienna. Photograph: Mark

“Music has always been absolutely vital to me since I was a little kid, but I’m not a musician so I had to find other ways to get at musical experience,” he says. “I’m often inspired as much by music, painting or poetry as I am by other cinema, but I also think it’s something that film can aspire to – it can be a kind of music.”

He goes on: “It’s something that’s woven into our lives – it doesn’t have to be something that only celebrities get to do. There are a lot of people who sing in their kitchens and might sing very beautifully, but we’ll never get to hear them. It’s the act of doing it that might help them to be in the world, and I think that’s very much what’s happening with Mary’s character in the film.”

This elevation of the finer details permeates much of Cohen’s work and is a particularly key element of his observations of the city – whichever city that may be.

“I just feel strongly that there is always a city that is entirely separate from the one tourists are led to, and that goes for any city,” he says. “In terms of Vienna, I was just reflecting my experience, going on random walks and tube rides, or opening the door of an unknown bar and stumbling onto one of the film’s most important locations.”

Raised first in Kabul and then Washington DC, Cohen moved to New York in the mid-80s, “when it was just at the tail end of a very rough period”, he explains. “It’s problematic to romanticise a city that is in rough shape in terms of crime and infrastructure falling apart. But there was a sense of mystery and possibility that had to do with people of all kinds going to New York to be able to have some freedom.”

He continues: “It’s kind of a great dark magnet throughout history where people could get away from parochial, predictable circumstances and enter into this sort of wild place.”

He then draws a comparison between the rise of real estate in New York and the current property crisis in London. But he is quick to stress the resilience of cities like these – both of which he is very fond.

Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours. Photograph: Paolo

“New York, when I ride the subway, is still an incredible mix of people and that’s what makes it an interesting place above all. And I feel the same way about London. I don’t see that they are really going to able to scrub New York and London entirely clean, but god damn they will try.”

There is passion and sensitivity in almost everything Cohen says, and he delivers his thoughts with care and precision. With this in mind, it seemed strange that the Guardian should describe him as somebody who categorically “hates indie films”.

“I don’t hate indie films,” he says. “‘Indie’ is just one of those words that has become sort of meaningless – it’s not about something that one needs to hate, it’s more about it not meaning anything. It’s like using the word ‘alternative’ in regard to music – it just doesn’t have any particular concrete value anymore to say that.”

And what if people want to call his films indie? “My filmmaking is done as far from commercial Hollywood as possible, but I haven’t been part of the Sundance world either. So by some standards I’m kind of invisible. But if you keep at it for 25, 30 years and make 70 films, sooner or later people realise you’re there. I don’t really care that much what people call it – if they need to call it indie then that’s not a big deal.”

And finally, I ask, why call the season Compass and Magnet?

“The main reason is that it amused me because I’m lost all the time,” he says. “For someone who travels a lot and films all the time, it’s just kind of funny and absurd that I am so poor with directions. And magnet of course is just because the basic premise of doing one’s work is to find out what things in the world call out and what things one is attracted to – what things stick.”

Jem Cohen: Compass and Magnet is at the Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse until 28 May.

barbican.org.uk
whitechapelgallery.org
picturehouses.com/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse

May 12, 2015
London Short Film Festival gets underway this weekend

Stick ’em up! Eve Hedderick-Turner, Matilda Sturridge and Bonnie Wright star in How (Not) to Rob a Train playing at Hackney Picturehouse on 13 January as part of the London Short Film Festival. Photograph: Claire Pepper

Short films will be in plentiful supply this month with the return of the London Short Film Festival to cinemas in East London.

Hackney Picturehouse and Oval Space are two of the host venues for the 12th edition of the festival, taking place from 9–18 January.

This year’s programme is billed as a snapshot of 21st Century Britain, complete with love stories, horror stories, comedy, documentary, music and low budget gems.

An eclectic itinerary includes themed programmes such as Surreal World and Night of the Living Docs, as well as special screenings and events.

Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting will be discussing their new project By Our Selves, a film that traces the journey of Romantic poet John Clare from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire accompanied by a straw bear.

Other highlights include a fashion film programme, a night of queer short film and music, and Fourwalls, a selection of films about housing made by Londoners.

Favouring original voices over mainstream filmmakers, the LSFF has become the most comprehensive showcase of short film in the UK.

Festival director Philip Ilson has spelt out the festival’s mission, saying: “We want to be challenging and questioning; looking behind the curtain to seek out what’s hidden, and expose it to the world.

“It’s an amazing feeling to get wowed by the ground breaking creative work coming through year after year and get that out in front of excited audiences.”

For the full programme see www.shortfilms.org.uk

January 9, 2015
Argentine film festival returns to Hackney

Two to tango: Real people were filmed dancing in Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat’s documentary Living Stars

Winter is finally sinking its fangs in, but citizens come warm yourselves in some Argentine sunshine this week as Hackney plays host to some of South America’s hottest cinema.

The Argentine Film Festival, now in its third year, returns to London from 27–30 November, with screenings at Hackney Picturehouse and at Brixton Ritzy, kicking off with black comedy Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) this Thursday.

A hit at Cannes a couple of months ago, the film is produced by the Almodóvar brothers and directed by Damian Szifron, already selling two million tickets back in Argentina and sure to get the festival off with a bang.

Movies & Malbec

Meanwhile, for those of you familiar with some the country’s more widely-known exports such as Malbec and Tango (or anyone that needs an extra incentive for watching sub-titles), this year will see a dedicated wine hub set up shop at the Gallery Bar in the Hackney Picturehouse.

It sounds like Punto Argento will be the perfect place to rendezvous to talk about the films, with the Tango Light troupe performing between screenings for a real taste of Argentine culture. “We’re delighted to be back for our third edition with a knock-out programme that includes three of Argentina’s highest-grossing films from the last 18 months, as well as some amazing gems from the international festival circuit and some unique documentaries,” says the festival’s director, Sofia Serbin de Skalon.

El Cine Argentino

The fact that we can now go to a festival of Argentine films at all is of course, in itself, notable. Forty years ago the country’s movie industry was still muzzled by a paranoid military junta, which chased some of the most promising filmmakers of a generation underground or into exile.

When democracy returned to the country in the 1980s films like La historia oficial, which deals with the horrors of the regime, received critical acclaim, but like many foreign-language films at the time did not gain mainstream traction outside of Latin America. However, there’s no doubt films from this region are beginning to resonate with international audiences, with high-profile movies such a Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2002) helping pave the way for Spanish language movies in non-Spanish speaking countries.

The Oscar win for El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in their Eyes) in 2010, however, can be seen as a significant inflection point for Argentine cinema, with Hollywood shining a spotlight on the country’s rich film heritage. It was by no means the country’s first big prize, but its surprise box office success did much to win over new audiences.

What’s On

Over the weekend you’ll have the chance to see 10 contemporary films from and about Argentina. As ever, there’s a rich sweep of styles and genres, from Death In Buenos Aires about a detective solving a 1980s high society homicide in the country’s shaky first steps of democracy to Cerro Torre, which explores the ethics of mountaineering and the ascent of Patagonia’s most-dangerous mountain.

Also not to be missed is the Nuevos Talentos section, where you can watch seven short films from some of the country’s most-promising young directors. This is well worth checking out for a flavour of the sharpest talent in Argentina right now, with films exploring everything from Argentina becoming a safe haven for Nazis after WWII to beauty queens.

Argentine Film Festival is at Hackney Picturehouse and Brixton Ritzy from 27–30 November.

www.argentinefilmfestival.co.uk

November 25, 2014
Hackney to play key role in Green Film Festival

Still from Musicwood

Hackney will receive a boost to its green credentials early next month when it holds the opening and closing galas of the UK Green Film Festival.

Venues across the country are to screen independent documentary films from around the world that explore a range of environmental issues.

The opening night at Hackney Picturehouse on 1 June sees the UK premiere of The Last Catch, by German director Marcus CM Schmidt. The film looks at the how bluefin tuna are being fished to extinction and the increasingly ruthless fight among fishermen for the last of a valuable resource.

There will also be a screening of Musicwood, a documentary about a group of guitar-makers who attempt to stop Native American loggers from destroying a primeval forest, while the festival closes with a screening of Expedition to the End of the World, which follows the adventures of a group of scientists, artists and philosophers as they sail to the rapidly melting massifs of North-East Greenland.

In all, seven feature length documentaries will be presented at the festival, all of which will be preceded by an accompanying short film. Each film will be competing for the Palme Verte Award, as well as the UKGFF Audience Award.

UK Green Film Festival 2014
1-8 June

May 1, 2014