The 59th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express® announces LFF Connects – a brand new series of thought-provoking high-impact talks intended to stimulate new collaborations and ideas by exploring both the future of film itself and how film engages with other creative industries including television, music, art, games and creative technology.
British filmmaker Christopher Nolan, internationally acclaimed for some of the most original, compelling and successful films in contemporary cinema (Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, Memento), and Tacita Dean, lauded for her art work in film (and whose grand-scale Tate Modern exhibition FILM transfixed audiences), will launch the new series of high profile talks on Friday 9 October at the BFI Southbank with a conversation that reframes the future of film.
Christopher Nolan and Tacita Dean are both passionate advocates within their fields for film – not simply as a technology – but as a medium that offers intrinsically rich and unique qualities needed by artists and filmmakers, as well as a hugely engaging experience for audiences. In the LFF Connects Film conversation moderated by BFI Creative Director Heather Stewart whose work in cultural programming is bringing new audiences and creative collaborators to film, Nolan and Dean will also explore the importance of seeing films projected on film as an essential part of our cultural experience, as well as the necessity of determining new archival and exhibition standards that secure film’s future, and why the debate around film needs to change. They will also be joined in the discussion by Alexander Horwath, Director of the Austrian Film Museum who has written and spoken extensively about the importance of showing film as film and preservation, asking how can any cultural heritage remain intelligible when handed down to future generations without attention to its medium'
Tacita Dean says, “As an artist who makes and exhibits film for reasons indexical to the medium, I have had no choice but to fight to get film re-appreciated for what it is: a beautiful, robust and entirely different way of making and showing images in the gallery and in the cinema. Film has characteristics integral to its chemistry and internal discipline that form my work and I cannot be asked to separate the work from the medium that I used to make it. We need to keep the medium distinct from the technology; we need to keep the choice of film available for artists, filmmakers and audiences.”
Trailblazers from other creative fields who are having an impact on how we make and think about films will be announced in the coming weeks as LFF Connects headliners.
