...And Now the Berlin Airlift Moves to London...

 Last week's film (Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three) took place in Berlin, a city that was completely cut off from the rest of Western Europe by a strange and unique set of circumstances.

This week's film imagines what might have happened had those circumstances occurred in London rather than Germany. The result is a film that is quintessentially, joyously British:


In Passport to Pimlico, a chance discovery of long-buried historical documents (and a considerable quantity of treasure) reveals that a neighbourhood in Pimlico, South London, is actually foreign soil - and its residents are not subjects of the Crown.


The screenplay then proceeds from that basic premise to hypothesise (in completely rational, logical stages) about what might happen following such a discovery.



Some writers have been tempted to read Passport to Pimlico as a metaphor for Brexit, but I personally think that entirely misses the point of the film. The residents of  Pimlico don't want to be separated from the rest of the country, and the Home Office doesn't want them to leave. Everyone in the film basically wants the same thing, but all of the red tape, all of the paperwork (everything that everyone apparently hates) just seems to spontaneously generate, as if  bureaucracy is a force more powerful than nature, and there is no escape from it.


It is hard to imagine this story being set in any other time or place. Moving it to Germany would give you the Berlin Crisis, which nearly ignited the Cold War. Setting it in the US would be even worse; just think about the Native American Reservations, or the siege of Waco, Texas in 1993. Or the Civil War, for that matter. Any group that tries to assert its independence from the United States invariably triggers an Apocalypse (but I digress).


The beauty of Passport to Pimlico is that there is no violence, no bloodshed, barely even any raised voices. All of that would be terribly un-British. 

There is simply a tremendous amount of paperwork.


We're screening Passport to Pimlico at 7.30 on the 11th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

*Visas will not be required.




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