Award Winning Independent Cinema

Our regular partners Birds’ Eye View have curated a ‘Reclaim The Frame : Vintage’ season for us as part of the BFI FAN Film Feels: Obsession season, on the theme of Women and Obsession. Join us for a double bill of two unique and under-screened female-made thrillers from the 80s plus a creative writing workshop tapping into one’s own obsessive capacities!

The audience are invited to an interval discussion led by Mia Bays, Birds’ Eye View’s Director-At-Large and Oscar-winning producer, plus a criminologist and film expert from the University of Plymouth. We’ll provide nibbles to keep energy levels high!

After the screenings there will be a workshop, hosted by the award winning poet and creative writing facilitator Be Manzini where the audience can explore their own objects of obsession, through words and images.

If you book for both films at the same time, you’ll benefit from our Double Bill Offer and only pay £10 in total to watch both films.

Smooth Talk (1986) directed by Joyce Chopra features Laura Dern in her debut lead role as Connie, a teenage girl who is pursued by an enigmatic older man. Atmospherically crafted Smooth Talk won the Grand Jury prize in the dramatic category at Sundance Film Festival. It unsettlingly contracts two types of sexual obsession – a teenager’s sexual curiosity and tendency to ‘crush’ and an older man’s fetishisation and manipulation of innocence.

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British noir Dance With A Stranger (1985) written by Shelagh Delaney is based on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain following her conviction for the murder of her lover. Ellis’s murder trial in the 1950s became a national obsession, later informing the debates leading to the abolishment of the death penalty in 1965. Dance With A Stranger explores what it means to commit a ‘crime of passion’ and how class and gender can inform the criminal justice system.

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This screening is part of Film Feels: Obsession, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network.
Explore all films and events at www.filmfeels.co.uk