PARADISE LOST

History in the Unmaking

Compelling and prophetic. A sad and telling inditement, yet I found it wonderfully sardonic and life-affirming – Andrew Kötting

A charming, faintly eccentric but fundamentally serious investigation into a mysterious crime in the second city: in which somebody killed the future, and then attempted, almost successfully, to hide the evidence – Owen Hatherley

A micro budget masterpiece of flâneurie. The sloshing of time, the misunderstandings of Brummies, the hopes, the dreams, the slacker skateboarders, the everyday ennui: it's all captured with Sinclair-ian wit and Meades-ian whimsy – Christopher Beanland

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Upcoming Screenings

TBA

Past Screenings

1/11/22, 7:30pm – The Electric Cinema, Birmingham, Q&A hosted by Michael Dring of the Birmingham Modernist Society. SOLD OUT! / Read interview

24/10/22, 7pm (Berlin time) – The Czech Centre, Berlin, with video-call Q&A. Hosted by Prague Film and Archicture Festival. Link

6/10/22, 9pm – Lantaren Venster, Rotterdam, Netherlands, part of the Brutalist Legacies programme at the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam. Link

4/10/22, 6pm – Centre for Architecture and Urban Planning, Prague, Czech Republic, part of Film and Architecture Festival. Link

28/9/22, 6pm – New Horizons Cinema, Wroclaw, Poland, part of MIASTOmovie Festival. Link

15/09/22 – The Warehouse Cafe, Birmingham, Q&A hosted by Joe Holyoak, part of Birmingham Heritage Week. Link

8/4/22, 12pm, Cinematheque, Winnipeg, Canada, part of Architecture + Design Film Festival. Link

23/11/21, 6:30pm, Twentieth Century Society online screening introduced by Otto Saumerez Smith and followed by Q&A. Link

6/11/21, 7pm, Artefact, Birmingham, part of Back to the Future exhibition. SOLD OUT!

20/10/21, 6pm, Warwick Arts Centre, In conversation with Andy Howlett and Otto Saumarez-Smith, part of Resonate Festival. Link

18/10/21, 6pm, Plymouth University, with panel discussion, part of Regeneration and Urban Heritage session with Jeremy Gould. Link

26/9/21, 5pm, Midlands Arts Centre, with Q&A, part of Flatpack Festival Autumn Edition SOLD OUT!

Press/Reviews

Alison Gillmore for Winnipeg Free Press 6/4/22

"Wryly funny and gently melancholy, […] the journey is thought-provoking, personal, wandering, weird and filled with deadpan English humour."

Josh Allen for Flatpack Festival 27/8/21

"My main takeaway was a renewed conviction that the public realm, and weird, possibly slightly sad, but open-ended spaces in the city must be fought for, that we must defend and seek to expand 'the right to the city'."

Phil Smith for Mythogeography June 2021

"Paradise Lost creates an engrossing, always entertaining and subtly intelligent infrastructure and then, in one swift and neatly understated feint, it takes us right down into the gravel of utopia…"

Paradise Lost, History in the Unmaking is a feature-length essay film about Birmingham Central Library and the death of Modernism. When filmmaker Andy Howlett set out with his camera to document the final days of the condemned Brutalist complex, little did he know the rabbit hole he was stumbling into…

Decried by the Council as an eyesore, but hailed by Historic England as an exemplar of postwar design, the story of John Madin's concrete colossus and the fight to save it is a curious one. In this psychogeographic detective story, Andy Howlett weaves together archive footage with on-the-ground explorations in an attempt to figure out what went wrong with yesterday's future.

Poster design © Charlie Best, photo © Pete Ashton

Contact: andyhowlett@hotmail.com

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