Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Film Screening - The Best of Midland Journey

Films containing nostalgic images of post war Coventry and Warwickshire are to be screened at the Warwick Arts Centre on Thursday 21 September in an event curated by the Media Archive for Central England (MACE).

The screening at 6.30pm under the title THE BEST OF MIDLAND JOURNEY aims to showcase the best titles from the MACE collection as well as some gems from other archives, and is introduced by Peter Walters of CVOne.

Included in the event will be a screening of A CITY REBORN, a film made by the Ministry of Information in 1945, which vividly depicts the ruined Coventry that existed at the end of World War II.

The post war government saw the destruction of the old Coventry as an opportunity to build a completely new and modern city. This feeling of optimism and hope out of so much tragedy is also found in the film COVENTRY CATHEDRAL which was made in 1958.

This film contains a first-hand-account from architect Basil Spence who explains his thinking behind the design for the new Coventry Cathedral. It gives a rare opportunity to see some of the people who worked on the project four years before their magnificent achievement opened to the public.

Moving outside Coventry, THE BEST OF MIDLAND JOURNEY will also put on the big screen for the unique television news material, most of which will be unseen since it was first broadcast on ITV forty years ago by the then television franchise holder ATV.

Intrepid ATV reporters will be seen finding out what’s newsworthy in Nuneaton, tackling the traffic in Hampton-in-Arden, visiting the University of Warwick before it was even built; and going on a pub-crawl with the Alcester Ale Tasters.

To complete the programme MACE will screen KERESLEY: A VILLAGE AND A STRIKE which was filmed in 1984. This poignant film shot at the height of the miners’ strike avoids the sensationalist approach by getting within the community in Keresley and finding out how striking miners and their families are surviving as the strike nears Christmas.

The Midland Journey project which aims to take archive film and video to the public through cinema screenings has been running successfully since 2005 thanks to the funding of Screen West Midlands and EM Media.

Tickets cost £6.25 (£5) from www.warwickartscentre.co.uk or the Box Office on 024 7652 4524.