BFI Video has announced two more titles as part of its Flipside label, presenting two rare and little seen films that explore changing attitudes towards sex and gender equality in 1960s Britain:
Lunch Hour (James Hill, 1962) and
Joanna (Mike Sarne, 1968). Both will come out on April 25, in dual-format BD/DVD editions.
The next BFI Flipside titles, released in July, will be
Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1971), and
Requiem for a Village (David Gladwell, 1975).
Lunch Hour
Shirley Anne Field (
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) stars as a young designer on the brink of an affair with a married male executive (Robert Stephens) at the company where she works, in a film based on the play by John Mortimer telling the story of an illicit lunch-hour rendezvous in 'real-time.'
Special features:
- James Hill shorts:
Skyhook: the adventure of oil exploration, deep in the tropics of Papua New Guinea
- Giuseppina: Oscar-winning short in which a young girl watches the quirky characters who pass by her father's petrol station over the course of a summer's day
- The Home-Made Car: a man restores his dilapidated Bullnose Morris, under the watchful eye of a curious young neighbor
- Illustrated booklet with essays by Sue Harper, James Piers Taylor and Rob Harries
Joanna
17-year-old Joanna (Genevieve Waite) is cool, stylish, and determined to start a new life as an art student in Swinging Sixties London. She indulges in the pleasures of casual sexual encounters, colourful daydreams and an impromptu trip to Morocco with the wise and debonair Lord Peter Sanderson (Donald Sutherland). But when Joanna falls in love with Gordon (Calvin Lockhart), from Sierra Leone, her life begins to get complicated.
Special features:
- Road to Saint Tropez (Mike Sarne, 1966): Sarne's debut film, an 'anti-travelogue' starring Udo Kier, Melissa Stribling and Gabriella Licudi
- Death May Be Your Santa Claus (Frankie Dymon Junior, 1968): an experimental examination of an interracial relationship in late 1960s London
- New interview with Mike Sarne (on the DVD)
- Joanna, Mike Sarne's novelisation of the film, presented as a downloadable PDF (on the DVD)
- Illustrated booklet with essays and film notes by Chris Campion (writer and author who is currently working on a biography of John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas) and an essay by Kodwo Eshun