At the upcoming 66th BFI London Film Festival Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia and acclaimed choreographer Akram Khan will be headlining the Festival’s LFF Connects discussion about what happens when dance meets film.
The Festival’s LFF Connects series explores the intersection between film and other creative industries through storytelling, creativity and innovation. In this year’s LFF Connects discussion, the creative team behind Creature, Kapadia's latest film on Khan's work, will share the journey of this fascinating encounter between film and dance, a genre-busting, immersive experience which challenges established boundaries between arts sectors.
Kapadia and Khan will be joined by director of photography Daniel Landin (Under the Skin, Ray & Liz) and editor Sylvie Landra (Leon, The Fifth Element) in a discussion hosted by Mariayah Kaderbhai, Head of Programmes at BAFTA.
As a filmmaker, Asif Kapadia has been such an exciting explorer of form, a creator of tremendous invention, artistry, and always as consummate storyteller," said outgoing BFI London Film Festival Director Tricia Tuttle, whose 2022 edition will be the last she heads. "Last year, we were delighted to host the world premiere of his stunning first foray into VR animation with Laika in our LFF Expanded programme; and he’s back at LFF again this year with a beautiful new work, made with Akram Khan, one of the world’s best choreographers and also a pioneer of form and a gifted storyteller. We welcome this unique opportunity to hear more about their creative collaboration, as they’ve worked to bring the formal tools of film and dance together in Creature.”
In 2021 Akram Khan (DESH, Until the Lions), who is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists today, created Creature, his third collaboration with the English National Ballet. One year later, Creature has become a film by the multi award-winning director Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona), one of the most influential documentary filmmakers of our generation.
Creature takes inspiration from Georg Büchner’s seminal play Woyzeck and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It promises to be the cinematic telling of a beautiful, tragic tale of an outsider’s search for belonging, the insatiable desires of the powerful, and the enduring hope found in human connection and compassion.
Asif Kapadia is an Academy®, BAFTA, Grierson and Grammy award-winning film director, writer and producer. His seminal film Senna on the tragic Brazilian racing star Ayrton Senna da Silva was a huge hit around the world, winning the BAFTA for Best Documentary. Kapadia then followed that with the universally acclaimed Amy, which is the most successful theatrical British documentary of all time, winning Academy, BAFTA and Grammy awards. Amy goes behind the scenes of the Amy Winehouse story, tackling the woman behind the tragic legend in a way only Kapadia can. Before it all, Kapadia directed the narrative film The Warrior, starring the late great Irrfan Khan, which he shot in India. The film went on to win BAFTAs for Outstanding British Film and Outstanding Debut. The filmmaker has also directed episodes of the Netflix series Mindhunter and directed the critically acclaimed 1971: The Year Music Changed Everything. He also co-directed and exec produced the mental health series The Me You Can’t See, starring Oprah, Prince Harry and Lady Gaga. In 2022 he will create a new four-part series about Camden’s musical history for Disney+.
Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists today contributing significantly to the arts in the UK and abroad. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including two Laurence Olivier Awards, the Bessie Award (New York Dance and Performance Award) and nine Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards. In recent years, Khan has moved into television, specifically documentaries. He has created three documentaries with Swan Films for Channel 4, the Sky Arts documentary series Why Do We Dance, and an episode of the Netflix series MOVE. His previous collaborators include the National Ballet of China, actor Juliette Binoche, ballerina Sylvie Guillem, choreographers/dancers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Israel Galván, singer Kylie Minogue and indie rock band Florence and the Machine, visual artists Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Tim Yip, writer Hanif Kureishi and composers Steve Reich, Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook and Ben Frost.
Creature is directed by Asif Kapadia, with choreography and stage direction by Akram Khan. An English National Ballet production, the producer of the film is Uzma Hasan (Firstborn, The Infidel) of Little House Productions. Creature will be released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland by BFI Distribution in 2023. The film will receive its World Premiere on Saturday 15 October at the BFI Southbank, NFT1.
For more information and to purchase tickets, check out the LFF website.
All photos courtesy of the BFI, used with permission.
