Free Thinking 2013 - Penny Woolcock

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2013

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Penny Woolcock talks to Samira Ahmed about directing a film version of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer. For the Free Thinking Festival, she returned to the city where she began her career. During her work at Trade Films in Gateshead she depicted the aftermath of the closure of the steelworks in Consett in When the Dog Bites. Her most recent project involved negotiating a truce between rival Birmingham gangs which she documented in One Mile Away. Recorded on Saturday 26th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.4	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids
0:25.5	the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.9	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.1	This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival.
0:35.9	For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.com.ukau.uk slash radio three.
0:41.9	Welcome to Freethinking and a journey into the visual mind of a multi-award-winning filmmaker
0:48.2	who's mixed documentary, fantasy, nostalgia, hip-hop and gang culture, and grand opera to startling effect.
0:56.5	Penny Wilcox began her film career here in the Northeast in the 1980s, with When the Dog Bites,
1:01.9	a film about the town of concert, struggling to cope after the closure of its massive steelworks.
1:07.6	A fascination with mixing realism with fiction in chronicling life at the margins has
1:12.5	marked much of her work and a number of her films have explored art and life on council
1:17.5	estates, from Macbeth on the estate to Tina Goes Shopping, itself a big influence on TV shows such as
1:24.0	shameless. Last year, Penny made the documentary one mile away, for which she spent
1:29.2	months helping broker a truce between two Birmingham street gangs around the time of the
1:33.7	2011 riots. But she's also carved out a career directing opera, starting with a film of
1:39.2	the death of Klinghofer in 2003 and more recently on stage, including the pearlfishes for the New York Met.
1:46.3	Her latest film, From the Sea to the Land Beyond, which combines a century of archive film
1:51.6	footage from the British coast with a music score by the band British Sea Power.
1:56.8	Please welcome Penny Wilcox.
2:05.4	Thank you. Please welcome Penny Wilcock. Penny, I'd like to start with one mile away,
2:08.1	which you made for Channel 4 was broadcast earlier this year
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.