Don Boyd Retrospective
LIDF are proud to be hosting the first retrospective of Don Boyd’s work which focuses on his films as a director. We’ll be screening several of his documentaries including Full Frontal in Flip-Flops (1998), The Passions of Louis Malle (2002), Andrew and Jeremy Get Married (2004), and the rarely seen but brilliant Lucia (1997).
We’ll also be showing some of his earlier classics War Requiem (Derek Jarman, 1989) and Aria (John Luc-Goddard et al, 1987). Don will be taking part in debates and screenings across the festival.’
Read the interview when Patrick Hazard (director of the LIDF) talked with Don Boyd.
Sunday April 25
Barbican Cinema 1,
18.15
Lucia (15)
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Length: 97min
Year: 1998
Synopsis: A small opera company gathers together to celebrate the wedding of one’s sister with a performance of the opera, Donizetta. Her brother hopes her new husband, a rich American tenor, will contribute cash to save the failing troupe. The only problem is the woman really loves another singer in the troupe. The film attempts to look at how relationships within an acting company forms while they are on the road.
‘Handsome to look at and gorgeous to listen to. Boyd’s fine soprano soars above some dazzling imagery’ The Times
+ Q&A with the director
Monday April 26
The Horse Hospital
19.30
Double-bill – An Evening with Don Boyd
Full Frontal in Flip-Flops
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 1998
Run Time: 52min
Documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of British naturism.
The Babe Business
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 1993
Run Time: 52min
A report on the many models – children, young teenagers, male models, runaway girls who live and work in New York. The staff of American `Vogue’ provide comment and a part of the film was shot during the New York spring fashion collections. Top models including Christie Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Kate Moss appear in front of and behind the stage and mix with the aspiring models. A portrait of life in New York from `the glitter to the gutter’.
Monday April 26
20.30 The Horse Hospital
Donald and Luba: A Family Movie
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 2000
Run Time: 91min
+ Q&A with the director
Friday April 30
Clapham Picturehouse
20.00
Aria
Directors: Ken Russell, Bruce Beresford, Julien Temple, Charles Sturridge, Nicolas Roeg, Bill Bryden, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Robert Altman, Franc Roddam
Producer: Don BOYD
Year: 1987
Length: 90min
Official Selection Festival de Cannes 1987
Don Boyd’s film Aria (1987) is an idiosyncratic work in the repertoire of opera-film. While most opera-films present an opera in its entirety, Aria consists of ten musical excerpts from ten different operas, each directed by a different director. In the visualization of operatic music, too, Aria is distinguished from other opera-films in that the director of each opera episode created radically imaginative visuals unconstrained by the narratives of the source operas. In some episodes, the visual narrative seems completely separated from the narrative of the source opera. However, a close analysis of Ana’s soundtrack reveals an intricate web between visual and musical narratives. This essay examines the surreptitious interplay between the visual text of the film and the musical and verbal texts of the source operas, showing how the visual narrative confirms or contradicts the operatic narrative despite the seeming rupture between the two planes of narrativity. The narrative polyphony between music and image helps us to re-evaluate Aria, which has been dismissed as a frivolous work unworthy of scholarly attention.
Tuesday May 4
The Passions of Louis Malle
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 2003
Run Time: 72min
A documentary portrait of the legendary French film director Louis Malle featuring many of his collaborators including playwrights David Hare and John Guare, his brother Vincent Malle, his wife Candice Bergen, the Observer film critic Philip French and a myriad of the movie stars, actors and actresses he worked with.
Thursday May 6
The Horse Hospital
18.30
Man, God and Africa
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 1992
Run Time: 52
While the media has focused on the violent history of South Africa, it has paid little attention to a social phenomenon of great importance. Some nine-million South African blacks live with a strong commitment to their religion, Pentecostal Christianity. Their faith has enabled them to survive appalling hardship and deprivation. Their religion is a blend of deep-rooted African traditions and the imported values of Christianity. This commitment could be a stabilizing force in the new South Africa. This film captures the joyous singing and rhythmic movement that is common to the various black churches. It shows the African influence on funerals, baptisms, and weddings. Through these ceremonies the churches foster a sense of community and pride at being black South African. Adherents cut across all social classes. One sees an educated civil rights lawyer practice centuries-old healing practices. We hear from representatives of the traditional Church hierarchy, such as Archbishop Tutu and Alan Boesack, who have a profound respect for the adaptation of Christianity to the African culture.
Thursday May 6
The Horse Hospital
20.00
Andrew and Jeremy Get Married
Director: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 2004
Run Time: 75min
Theirs is, at heart, a love story: Andrew and Jeremy met each other at Bromptons Club, a legendary gay bar in Earls Court, London. Despite a considerable age gap (Andy is 49, Jeremy 69) and stark social differences, they fell in love and began sharing their lives together. Five years later, in May 2004, they got married at an emotional and intimate Town Hall ceremony.
Andy is a retired bus driver from South London, handsome in that rough and roguish way. Jeremy is an English professor – cute, fussy, vivacious and clearly from a patrician world. Both men experienced painful early struggles with their sexuality. Jeremy had a failed marriage to a woman, followed by a misguided attempt to ‘cure’ himself. Andy cruised public washrooms and indulged with much promiscuity – gay bars, drug addiction, crime, prison and rehabilitation. Jeremy has literary connections and moves in a sphere of chic dinner parties, poetry readings and gay picnics. Between their homes in London and their exploits in Palm Springs and Hollywood, we get to know these likeable, complex and sensitive men in a way that is rare in movies – which is to say we begin to care deeply about them and their relationship.
+ Panel
Saturday May 1
British Museum, Sackler Room
14.30 – 15.30
Don Boyd discusses ’ ‘Hamlet in China’ – Don Boyd Retrospective
Saturday May 8
British Museum, Stevenson Theatre
15.45
War Requiem
Director: Derek Jarman
Producer: Don Boyd
Country: UK
Year: 1989
Length: 92min
Synopsis: A film with no spoken dialogue, just follows the music and lyrics of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem, which include WWI soldier poet Wilfred Owen’s poems reflecting the war’s horrors. It shows the story of an Englishman soldier (Wilfred Owen) and a nurse (his bride) during World War I. It also includes actual footage of contemporary wars (WWII, Vietnam, Angola, etc.)
