We have curated a ‘Reclaim The Frame : Vintage’ season for you as part of the BFI FAN Film Feels: Obsession season, on the theme of Women and Obsession. Join us for a unique and under-screened female-made film from the 80s plus creative writing workshops tapping into one’s own obsessive capacities!

The audience are invited to a post-screening panel discussion led by Mia Bays, Birds’ Eye View’s Director-At-Large and Oscar-winning producer. She will be joined by Criminologist Susan Batchelor from the University of Glasgow and Film Critic Hannah McGill. After the screenings there will be a workshop, hosted by the award winning poet and creative writing facilitator Be Manzini where the audience can explore their own objects of obsession, through words and images.

The film on the bill is Dance With A Stranger (1985), a darkly haunting British noir written by Shelagh Delaney, who is perhaps best known as the writer behind A Taste Of Honey (1961). Based on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain following her conviction for the murder of her lover, David Blakeley. Ellis’s murder trial in the 1950s became a national obsession which later informed the debates leading to the abolishment of the death penalty in 1965. Dance With A Stranger explores what it means to commit a ‘crime of passion’ and how class and gender can inform the criminal justice system.

Cast:

Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, Ian Holm

96 minutes

1985

R (adult situations/language, violence)

In the 64 years since Blakely and Ellis died, the case has fascinated the British, perhaps because it combines sexuality and the class system, two of their greatest interests. Blakely was upper-class, polished, affected, superior. Ellis was a working-class woman who made herself up to look like Marilyn Monroe, and used the business of being a bar hostess as a way to support her young son and maintain her independence from men. Ironically, she was finally undone by her emotional dependence on Blakely, who gave and then withdrew his affection in a way that pushed her over the edge.

REVIEWS

★★★★

“A film of astonishing performances and moody, atmospheric visuals.”
Robert Ebert

★★★★

“Richardson gives full rein to the two things that British cinema has hardly ever had the guts to face: sexual obsession and bad manners. And, since this is England, it’s the latter that finally sends her to the scaffold.”

Time Out