This sell-out Bristol Silents event at Watershed’s Cinema
1 was packed with interested film fans for the launch of our
NEW TERRITORIES season.
Kenneth Branagh - the film’s Director and Executive Producer
Simon Mosley introduced the film and took questions from the
audience following the screening.
A more complete transcript of the interview with Ken will be
available in the future, below are a few snippet and images
from the event.
Starring Bristol-based actor Paul McGann and Frances Barber,
"Listening" is a departure for Kenneth Branagh best
known for his reworkings of Shakespearean classics and major
literary epics. Not a silent film but with but with "limited
dialogue". This was the ideal launch to a season that celebrates
pioneering filmmakers and actors. The 23 minute film itself
took six days to shoot in 2002.
"I wanted to see
if I could tell a story in a compressed way…to convey
an accelerated intimacy that comes from not having words."
"I wanted to show a sense of lives passing and missing
each other, and layers of meaning culminating in a beautiful
melancholy."
On the films stars Paul McGann and Frances Barber "Both
found it interesting in a concentrated way to convey the truth
of a character without words, I also wanted his face to have
what Paul has, a beatific, otherworldly quality like James Cagney
- a far away fella."
