‘The World Before You’
Exploration, Science and Nature in British Silent Film
15th to 18th April 2010
PHOENIX SQUARE FILM & DIGITAL MEDIA
Tickets Now available
For bookings contact Phoenix Square Box Office (+44) 0116 242 2800
Ticket prices (include lunch each day and tea/coffee)
Festival 4 day pass £95 (£70 concession)
Festival 1 day pass £45 (£30 concession).
British Silents, the BFI and Phoenix Square are delighted to welcome you to the 13th annual British Silent Film Festival with a programme packed with rare and fascinating film gems – many from the BFI National Archive. We are particularly pleased to be back in Leicester, where the Festival started in 1998, at the UK’s newest cinema with its state-of –the-art facilities for presenting archive film and its superb café bar and social spaces. We will do everything to make your visit an enjoyable and memorable experience.
This year’s Festival, on the theme of exploration, science and nature, offers an eclectic selection of feature films and shorts, fiction and non fiction that take you on an international voyage of discovery. From early British nature films to Edith Maude Hull’s steamy Arabian adventure The Sheik, to the Torres Straits and the world’s first anthropological film. Polar exploration features strongly as we approach the centenary of Scott and Amundsen’s epic quests and we are thrilled to be restaging the race to the South Pole in association with our Norwegian friends.
Music features very strongly, and we are pleased to welcome back the fabulous Dodge Brothers whose line up includes two Professors in Film Studies, Mike Hammond and Mark Kermode accompanying the delightful Clara Bow playing to William Wellman’s Beggars of Life. Damien Coldwell’s acclaimed Blue Grass music will also be played live to Tol’able David and David Allison will be playing Celtic folk to the St Kilda Tapes on the moving evacuation of ‘Britain’s Loneliest Isle’ in 1930 featuring interviews with the last survivor from St Kilda’s lost community.
All films and presentations are accompanied with live music from the worlds leading silent film musicians: Neil Brand, Gunter Buchwald (Germany) Philip Carli (USA) Stephen Horne and John Sweeney.
Festival programmed and organized by Neil Brand, Bryony Dixon and Laraine Porter with the support of De Montfort University Cinema and Television History Research Centre.
This project has been enabled by EM Media and the UK Film Council’s Digital Archive Fund supported by the National Lottery.
To find out more about the BFI National Archive visit www.bfi.org.uk
