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 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.

Join Birds’ Eye View for a Q&A hosted by Mia Bays (Director-At-Large of Birds’ Eye View and an Oscar-winning producer) with Dance with a Stranger BAFTA AWARD WINNING director, Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) along with Shelagh Delaney’s daughter, the writer Charlotte Delaney and Criminologist Melindy Brown.

After the panel Charlotte Delaney will be leading a creative writing workshop where audience members can explore their own objects of obsession, through words and images.

This screening is part of Film Feels: Obsession, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network.

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