The BFI is screening some of the late John Pilger’s most important films throughout the month of November, writes Joe Lauria.
Courtesy of BFI.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
The British Film Institute is paying tribute to the late filmmaker John Pilger with a series of screenings of some of his 60 films beginning this weekend through the end of November.
On Monday evening at 6:15 pm at BFI Southbank a panel discussion will take place led by Anthony Hayward, author of In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger. The panel will include film director Ken Loach; Christopher Hird of Dartmouth Films and Richard Creasey, former head of documentaries at ATV and Central Independent Television. CN will publish a video of the discussion.
At the end of the panel Consortium News will present the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press award to John Pilger’s partner Jane Hill. We were able to inform John a couple of months before he died in December 2023 that he had won the award. This will be followed on Monday night by a screening of his film The War You Don’t See (2010).
Some of the other films to be shown are The Quiet Mutiny (1970), which broke the story of U.S. soldiers’ drug taking and rebellion against their officers; Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) about the aftermath of Pol Pot’s regime; Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002); Death of a Nation (1994) about repression in East Timor; Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003); The Coming War on China (2016) and Utopia (2013), about discrimination against Indigenous Australians in Pilger’s homeland.
Here is a listing of all of the Pilger films that will be screened by the BFI through Nov. 30.
CN Live! will this weekend broadcast interviews with four men who worked closely with Pilger on his films. Stay tuned!
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.