20th Anniversary of London Orbital
https://www.deepermovieschannel.com/We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of London Orbital by releasing the film digitally alongside a new interview with filmmakers, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. This release is in partnership with the newly launched Deeper Movies Channel, a new TVOD platform that launches on 4th November 2022 using filmmakers as curators in residence.
An extraordinary and visionary film released in 2002 produced in conjunction with Iain Sinclair’s acclaimed book documenting his year-long journey around the M25 motorway on foot. The newly filmed interviews reveal Sinclair and Petit discussing the impact of London Orbital and its lasting appeal; how it fits into the new media landscape and its relevance for today. The interview is only available digitally from our website or from Deeper Movies Channel.
Purchase London Orbital on DVD and digitally
London Orbital blends and blurs fiction and non-fiction in its psycho-geographic journey. It is a road movie and a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past. The M25 serves primarily as a metaphor as Petit and Sinclair capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving around it provokes. Their narratives are filled with musings and observations that their archaeological journey digs up in an attempt to write the history of a place that resists historicity.
Two decades after its release, the film is something of a time capsule for us. Released soon after 9/11 and Afghanistan, and months before the second Iraq War, the film’s hangover of “the end of history” looms large. In our current historical moment, this can feel anachronistic.
And yet, though the M25 might be circular, history is not. Petit and Sinclair’s narration situates their film and by extension, us. Twenty years later London Orbital reveals a transitory state: the legacy of Thatcherism with stories of entrepreneurial men in the guise of Essex gangsters and covert arms deals with Pinochet and privatisation, versus the rise of the War on Terror and the emergence of mass surveillance.
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