Free Films In Peckham And Nunhead

By Londonist Last edited 115 months ago
Free Films In Peckham And Nunhead

Peckham Rye Outdoor Cinema in 2013. Photo by Colin Tonks.

One of the strengths of the Peckham and Nunhead Free Film Festival, which starts next week, is the matching of films being screened to locations the area offers. This year, you can see Hitchcock’s Vertigo up on the roof of the Bussey Building, the bovine-based docu-drama The Moo Man in the Gringa Dairy (where they make Mexican cheese), an outdoor screening of Symphony of the Soil at the new Glengall Wharf community garden, and Beer Wars (plus piss-up perhaps?) in the Brick Brewery, sitting amid vats used to make craft ales and cider.

There are over 30 screenings taking place at 25 venues across SE15, including parks, pubs, shops, historic buildings and cafés, as part of the fifth year of this completely free and volunteer-run festival.

Another highlight is Welcome to Busseywood, the UK's largest one-day African film event, presenting a marathon of movies from all over the continent plus films from the UK exploring the experiences of the African diaspora.

There is plenty of local talent on show with the Peckham Film Open and Peckham Shorts, while Dulwich-born Hollywood star Ida Lupino is celebrated on the closing night with a screening of her noirish melodrama The Bigamist. Then, hop over to All Saints Church near Peckham Rye station, where local film-maker John Whitfield will screen his WWI-themed short Some Foreign Field alongside Derek Jarman’s tour-de-force, War Requiem. And then there's Induction, a short made by and starring Peckhamites, showing before Billy Wilder's The Apartment in Peckham Library.

There are also crowd-pleasers such as O Brother Where Art Thou and The Iron Giant alongside cult classics like Patrick Keiller’s London, once-banned horror flick The Beast (uncensored!) and Salt of the Earth, a 1954 curio made by film-makers black-listed during the McCarthy era witch-hunts. Pianist Neil Brand will play along with silent comedy and a set of rare Edwardian films will screen on the site of the original Gaumont film studios in Camberwell.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the festival closes with a special event called Infinity, which will see the 70-foot-tall façade of Brayards Estate transformed with digital animations and 3D mapping by students from the University of Greenwich, all set to sounds and music by Hot Chip’s Al Doyle.

The Peckham and Nunhead Free Film Festival takes place at various venues between 4-14 September. For more information see listings or download a programme from the website. Entry is, obviously, free.

Last Updated 27 August 2014