Presented by James Holland and Al Murray.

This screening will be of 2 phenomenal wartime films from Humphrey Jennings, one of Britain’s greatest documentary filmmakers.

The Silent Village

The villagers of Cwmgiedd re-enact a Nazi massacre in Czechoslovakia, in Humphrey Jennings’ unforgettable propaganda film.

At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (often said to be Britain’s greatest documentary filmmaker) ingeniously retells the story as if happening in Cwmgiedd, whose inhabitants re-enact the tragic events.

It’s a brilliant counterfactual twist on the ‘story documentary’ format so often favoured by the wartime Crown Film Unit, not only expressing with great power and empathy the tragedy, bravery and moral importance of Lidice but also making unbearably palpable, for domestic viewers of the time, what is at stake for Britain in its defence against German invasion. It’s also brilliantly filmmaking, reserved at first then building, with Jennings’ characteristic attention to telling visual and aural detail, to an emotionally wrenching climax. Last but not least, it’s a deeply felt tribute, by the most English of Englishmen, to Welshness and Wales. This government film is a public record, preserved and presented by the BFI National Archive on behalf of The National Archives, home to more than 1,000 years of British history.

Fires Were Started

British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings wrote and directed this World War II propaganda docudrama celebrating the heroic bravery of Britain’s fire fighters at a time when German bombers were causing endless conflagrations. The uncredited actors are real firemen from a working London fire house, but Jennings and his crew organize the footage into a fictionalized story about a new man joining the crew and meeting his fellow firefighters (both male and female) before embarking on his first assignment.