In association with
In protest of The Bomb — two milestone films of anti-nuclear activism from the 1950s and 1980s, as relevant today as ever.
For four days during Easter, 1958, thousands marched from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Hampshire. The resulting film, March to Aldermaston, a voluntary work by anonymous film technicians including Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reitz, was partly funded by Contemporary Films and serves as a testament to public solidarity against a grave new threat, a formative moment for CND and the new left, and a notable work from the auspices of the ‘Free Cinema’ movement in Britain.
Filmed over seven months in 1982-3 by the young film students Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, with the vital support of the women they document, Carry Greenham Home provides an up-close view of the fierce oppositional force the women mounted against the siting of a nuclear arsenal in Berkshire as well as their more intimate moments of burden and bonding.
The films will be followed by a panel discussion, chaired by Selina Robertson, between Beeban Kidron, Amanda Richardson and Dr. Guy Westwell of Queen Mary University regarding the role of ‘films of peace’, the power of protest on film and the making of Carry Greenham Home.
MARCH TO ALDERMASTON / Film & TV Committee for Nuclear Disarmament / UK / 1958 / 30 mins
CARRY GREENHAM HOME / Beeban Kidron, Amanda Richardson / UK / 1983 / 66 mins
Beeban Kidron is a member of the UK’s House of Lords and a former film director. She is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation. She has played a central role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world.
Before she became a peer, Baroness Kidron was an award-winning film director, with titles including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar, and hard-hitting documentaries InRealLife and Sex, Death and the Gods. She co-founded the charity Filmclub (now Into Film) in 2006, and was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012.
Amanda Richardson is a documentary filmmaker whose career has been defined by a deep commitment to telling human stories with honesty and clarity. After graduating in graphic design in 1982, she met fellow student Beeban Kidron at the National Film and Television School, the youngest students admitted at the time. Together they went on to create Carry Greenham Home – a powerful and intimate account of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, born from joining the protest and living and filming alongside women at the camp.
Amanda has built a distinguished career across independent and broadcast documentary, with her own production company, working at Channel 4 and the BBC, where she spent many years shooting, directing and producing observational documentaries. Her work consistently focuses on human experience in its most raw and meaningful forms – telling stories of frontline healthcare and maternity, asylum seekers and prison life, as well as exploring themes of birth, death, loss and resilience; driven by a simple instinct: to stay close to real lives, and to tell their stories truthfully.
Dr Guy Westwell is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of War Cinema – Hollywood on the Front-line (2006), Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema (2012) and co-author of The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (2020). His is currently writing a book titled, Films for Peace: Beyond the War and Anti-war Film.
Selina Robertson is a film programmer and curator researching feminist and queer filmmaking and exhibition histories. She is co-founder of queer feminist curating collective Club des Femmes. Since 2016, Club des Femmes has been curating screenings to collectively learn from the personal and political histories documented in Carry Greenham Home. She is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck.