British Silent Film Festival, Leicester
In this year’s reliably illuminating celebration of British film before 1930, you can catch the work of the sparky screenwriter Lydia Hayward in Not For Sale (Fri), a 1924 comedy about an aristocrat on his uppers who is forced to take digs at a Bloomsbury boarding house. The Guns Of Loos (Thu), a melodrama focusing on a romantic tug-of-war for a Red Cross nurse, shows too, while Geoff Brown gives a talk (Thu) on the subject of whether Hitchcock’s Blackmail really was the first British talkie. Brown will use excerpts to show that the truth isn’t as black-and-white as the cinematography.
Phoenix, Thu to 13 Sep
The Colour Of Money, London
A fascinating and wide-ranging season addressing the subject of money begins this week with a gala screening of Inequality For All. A lively history of the US economy by public policy professor Robert Reich, it will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee. Among the rarely screened highlights elsewhere is The White Balloon (20 Sep), the lyrical 1995 debut by Jafar Panahi (whose Closed Curtain opens this week), which tells of a young Iranian girl’s quest to buy a goldfish. There’s also the highly charged screen version of David Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross (20 Sep), the blood-spattered consumerist satire of the 1978 Dawn Of The Dead (14 Sep), Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic Greed (13 Sep) with piano accompaniment, and the little-seen Hyenas, by the visionary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty (13 Sep). It’s a season that merits cracking open the piggy bank.
Barbican Centre, EC2, Thu to 20 Sep
How To Change The World, Nationwide
This year’s winner of the environmental prize at the Sheffield DocFest explores the origins of Greenpeace and the eco-protest movement, beginning in 1971 when a group of activists sailed in a fishing boat from Vancouver, Canada to Amchitka, a tiny island off the west coast of Alaska, with the intention of halting President Nixon’s atomic bomb tests. Screenings will be followed by a satellite Q&A presided over by Mariella Frostrup and featuring the film’s writer-director, Jerry Rothwell, as well as Vivienne Westwood, a long-standing Greenpeace supporter, and Emily Hunter, daughter of Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter.
Various venues, Wed
Masterpieces Of Polish Cinema, Manchester
This touring season of Polish greats selected by Martin Scorsese continues, incorporating many of that country’s finest auteurs. Andrzej Wajda is represented by Man Of Iron (Tue), in which characters from his earlier film Man Of Marble are transposed to the backdrop of real political upheaval in early 1980s Poland (there’s even a cameo for future president Lech Wałęsa). Two exceptional Krzysztof Kieślowski pictures also feature: A Short Film About Killing (16 Sep) and Blind Chance (14 Sep). The latter, made in 1981 but refused release by the Polish authorities for six years, shows three different outcomes to the tale of a man running to catch his train: think of it as a political Sliding Doors.
Home, to 16 Sep
