Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun

Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.

The English seaside town of Brighton in all its festive, bohemian, campaigning glory has inspired a remarkable fusion of silent film and music by filmmaker Lizzie Thynne and composer Ed Hughes. Drawing on such precedents as Walter Ruttmann's 1927 silent classic Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, this new film depicts a day in the life of the city, darting back and forth through time to encompass archive of the forgotten histories and contemporary events that have defined this raffish town on the English seaside. A kaleidoscope of local identities from is accompanied by a sumptuous symphonic score performed by principal players from the Orchestra of Sound and Light.