Tag: Iain Forsyth

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

Broken English

Directors – Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 96m

*****

Musician and cultural icon Marianne Faithfull is interviewed at length, and her life and artistic achievements examined from several angles – compelling documentary is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, March 20th

Who is Marianne Faithfull? Given that, sadly, she died during the making of this documentary about her, we should ask another question. Who was Marianne Faithfull? 

Marianne appears extensively here as a real life, a 78-year-old interviewed by actor George MacKay (from The Beast, Bertrand Bonello, 2023; Femme, Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping, 2023; 1917, Sam Mendes, 2019) for The Ministry of Not Forgetting, an institution created specially for this film narrative where it is run by Tilda Swinton (from Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021; Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho, 2013; Orlando, Sally Potter, 1992) in a suit and tie who delivers all manner of fascinating pronouncements about Marianne’s life and work, and at one point even explores that territory by choreographing a dancer’s movements.

While The Ministry of Not Forgetting provides a structure within which Faithfull’s humanity and legacy can be explored, this latest film from Forsyth and Pollard (20, 000 Days on Earth, 2014; The Extraordinary Miss Flower, 2024) is characteristically kaleidoscopic.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Exhibitions Music

Miseris Succurrere Disco
(I Learn to Help
Those in Need)

© Paul Heartfield

Curators – Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard – 2026 – UK

****

A chapel interior is repurposed as a reflection on how personal tragedy can awaken empathy, mercy and collective care – exhibition / installation at Fitzrovia Chapel from Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 25th

It’s a strange phenomenon when you attend an exhibition / installation and the unfamiliar venue is, to you, as exciting as the event itself. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s new outing isn’t a film, but an exhibition, the second of three they’ve created in this particular space as it turns out. And the space they’ve deployed is fabulous, a new one on me. 

The Byzantine-inspired Fitzrovia Chapel, as the name implies, is situated in the heart of Fitzrovia, the area of London North of Oxford Street between Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road. It’s the chapel of the former Middlesex Hospital, one of London’s flagship NHS teaching hospitals, which was closed in 2006. You may be familiar with the chapel from King Charles’ 2024 Christmas broadcast.

The venue is open on particular days, often Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but not every week, and opening times can vary if the space is hosting an exhibition.

What can present challenges is if, as this writer did, you attend a show without being familiar with the space as it normally appears to visitors outside of exhibitions / installations. … Read the rest

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Dance Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

The Extraordinary
Miss Flower

Directors – Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 73m

****

A suitcase containing love letters, telexes and photographs found after her death, which inspired songs from singer Emilíana Torrini, becomes the key to a woman’s interior life – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th

Every so often, a feature film turns up that doesn’t really fit the obvious categories, and this is one of those. It might be described as a cross between a documentary, a music promo and a home movie. Yet, none of those makeshift, pressed-into-service labels quite do it justice.

It’s a documentary because its starting point is a collection of personal items – love letters, telexes and photographs – kept in a suitcase by a woman named Geraldine Flower and subsequently found by her daughter Zoe some time after Geraldine’s death. Which is to say, found by her daughter Zoe, Zoe’s musician husband Simon Byrd and their friend the singer Emilíana Torrini. The latter had recorded some four albums and had come to a sort of creative impasse where she wanted to make another album but just couldn’t find the right creative spark. And then, the contents of Geraldine’s rediscovered case provided that impetus.… Read the rest