Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 16: Thu Jan 16

Akenfield (Hall, 1974): Garden Cinema, 6pm


This screening, part of the 1970-80 British Cinema season at the Garden Cinema, also screens on January 28th. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will feature an introduction by the writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell.

Time Out review:
A fitfully engaging oddity, adapted by Ronald Blythe from his own study of everyday life, past and present, in a Suffolk farming village. The use of non-professional actors is for the most part effective in a sub-Loachian kind of way, but the intercutting between the largely prosaic lives of Akenfield's contemporary inhabitants, and the harsher but seemingly more lyrical existence of their Edwardian forebears, makes for some fairly simplistic contrasts. That said, Ivan Strasberg's lush, soft-focus landscape photography - especially when accompanied by the lilting pastoral strains of Tippett's 'Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli' - imbues the past with a not unappealing romantic aura.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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