John Grant to kick off Sheffield Doc/Fest 2017

The first snippets of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s upcoming edition have been announced, including details of the opening gala. To mark 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act, the festival will open in Sheffield’s City Hall with the world premiere of Daisy Asquith’s documentary Queerama. The film takes the form of archive material that captures the “relationships, desires, fears and expressions of gay men and women starting in 1919” that Asquith has unearthed from the BFI National Archive. These clips are weaved together with music by John Grant and Hercules & Love Affair; Grant will be in town for the screening and will follow the film with a live performance.

WikiLeaks: A Love Story 

The festival also marks 50 years since the Summer of Love by exploring the “rule-breaking and boundary-pushing artists who are creatively and politically forging new movements for resistance and change.” Falling under this banner is emerging British artist Anna Ridler, who’ll present the world premiere of WikiLeaks: A Love Story, an interactive installation featuring augmented reality. And if ever cinema had a rule-breaker it is the great Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman's Contract; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) – the writer-director will be in town for an onstage discussion of his career and to present his new doc about the life of the German theologian and religious reformist Martin Luther.

Summer of Love retrospective

This year’s retrospective, titled 1967: Summer of Love and Disobedience, also looks back 50 years to the zeitgeist of 1967 and will include a very rare screening of Silent Revolution / Black Liberation, Yves de Laurot’s lost masterpiece of the civil rights movement featuring Malcolm X and narrated by Ossie Davis. Also featured in the retrospective is Allan King’s controversial Warrendale, a cinéma vérité study of the lives of 12 emotionally disturbed children.

The retrospective also features Far From Vietnam, a portmanteau film in which the filmmakers of the French New Wave demonstrated their contempt for the Vietnam war: the inimitable Chris Marker produces, while the shorts come from Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Joris Ivens, William Klein and Claude Lelouch. Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, meanwhile, takes us back to the heart of 67 via a series of psychedelic interviews and live performance by Pink Floyd and a cast of ‘Swinging London’ musicians and actors.

Also attending the festival will be three contemporary filmmakers who have individually made unflinching examinations of race in America today: Yance Ford (Strong Island) and Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan (Whose Streets).