Theatreship Presents: A Matter of Life and Death with Horace Ove introduction

Theatreship presents Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger, part of a BFI major UK-wide celebration of one of the greatest and most enduring filmmaking partnerships: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.    Over six events, we celebrate their bold, subversive and iconoclastic films, pairing each with contemporary and complementary performance.

A Matter of Life and Death
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote
UK 1946. 104 mins
Rating: U

Set in a gorgeously photographed Technicolor England and a monochrome heaven, A Matter of Life and Death took the imaginative daring of jointly credited writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to new heights.
David Niven plays a British airman who survives a plane crash and falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter), only to be summoned to the afterlife by a heavenly ‘Conductor’ (Marius Goring). But is heaven just a hallucination brought on by brain injury?

Powell and Pressburger layer breathtaking visual tricks on top of this whimsical premise, such as a celebrated point-of-view shot in which our hero’s eyelid closes over the camera lens. The film also works as a sly satire on Anglo-American relations at the end of WWII.   Alongside this piece of the British cinematic canon, Theatreship will be presenting a discussion and introduction to pioneering black director Horace Ové, as part of a question of who gets to be a part of the canon and why.

Leading the discussion, will be Simeilia Hodge-Dalloway, Founder and Artistic Director/CEO at Beyond the Canon.  She has been listed seven consecutive years in The Stage: Top 100 Power List. In 2020, Simeilia won The Stage Innovation Award for her work on diversifying arts boards across England through her founded organisation Artistic Directors of the Future and in the same year she was included in the Who’s Who directory of noteworthy and influential people who impact British life.

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