Remembering David Lean
Movies
3.5 hrs
March 01, 2023 6:30 pm Wednesday

March brings the blooming flowers and the great joys of David Lean's films to Lamakaan.

About David Lean: Sir David Lean CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. Widely considered one of the most influential figures in British cinema, Lean directed the large-scale epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984).[1] He also directed the film adaptations of two Charles Dickens novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), as well as the romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945).

Originally a film editor in the early 1930s, Lean made his directorial debut with 1942's In Which We Serve, the first of four collaborations with Noël Coward. Beginning in the Summertime of 1955, Lean started to make internationally co-produced films financed by the big Hollywood studios; in 1970, however, the critical failure of his film Ryan's Daughter led him to take a fourteen-year break from filmmaking, during which he planned many film projects which never came to fruition. In 1984 he had a career revival with A Passage to India, adapted from E. M. Forster's novel; it was an instant hit with critics but proved to be the last film Lean would direct.

Lean's affinity for pictorialism and inventive editing techniques has led him to be lauded by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott. Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound "Directors' Top Directors" poll in 2002. Nominated seven times for the Academy Award for Best Director, which he won twice for The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, he has seven films in the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films (with three of them being in the top five) and was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990.

Film Title: Great Expectations | 1946 | 118 minutes | English language |

About the film: Great Expectations is a 1946 British drama directed by David Lean, based on the 1861 novel by Charles Dickens and starring John Mills and Valerie Hobson. The supporting cast included Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan, Anthony Wager, Jean Simmons, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt, and Alec Guinness.

The script is based on a slimmed-down version of Dickens' novel. It was written by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Cecil McGivern, Ronald Neame, and Kay Walsh after Lean had seen an abridged 1939 stage version of the novel written by Alec Guinness.

Film Title: Brief Encounter | 1945 | 87 minutes | English language |

About the film: Brief Encounter is a 1945 British romantic drama film directed by David Lean from a screenplay by Noël Coward, based on his 1936 one-act play Still Life.

Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, and Joyce Carey, it follows a passionate extramarital affair in England shortly before World War II. The protagonist is Laura, a married woman with children whose conventional life becomes increasingly complicated after a chance meeting at a railway station with a married stranger with whom she subsequently falls in love.

SCREENING FOLLOWED BY DISCUSSION! ALL ARE WELCOME!!! ENTRY IS FREE & OPEN TO ALL!!!

Organizer
Lamakaan
Lamakaan, An Open Cultural & inclusive space in Hyderabad that promotes and presents the best of arts, literature, movies, theatre, debates, discussions, and dialogue with a commitment to being open and accessible.