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The festival is organised by the European Commission Representation in Malta in collaboration with the Media Desk in Malta.
Full programme of films: http://ec.europa.eu/malta/news/event_en.htm
Director/producer: Adam Low
Executive Producer: Anthony Wall
Production company: BBC Arena
For the first time on television, Arena tells the whole story of the life and work of TS Eliot including the happiness he found in the last years of life in his second marriage. His widow Valerie Eliot has opened her personal archive, hitherto unseen, including the private scrapbooks and albums in which Eliot assiduously recorded their life together.
Arena brings an unprecedented insight into the mysterious life of one of the 20th century's greatest poets, and re-examines his extraordinary work and its startling immediacy in the world today. Thomas Stearns Eliot materialises as banker, critic, playwright, children's writer, churchwarden, publisher, husband and poet.
Contributors include Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Lady Spender, Jeanette Winterson, Christopher Ricks and Andrew Lloyd-Webber
T.S. Eliot is the byword for Modernism in poetry. He’s as modern now as he was when he wrote his poems – which are as fresh and challenging to today’s young as they were was to his own contemporaries. Arena explores not just the abiding greatness of Eliot, but also his immediacy in the world today.
Now, for the first time in forty years, the T.S. Eliot Estate has agreed to a full-length documentary about his life and work. Born in St Louis, Missouri, Eliot came to Europe before the First World War and settled in London, where he wrote his revolutionary modernist poem, The Waste Land. The film looks at his development as a poet – from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to Four Quartets – and uncovers other, less known, T. S. Eliots: the Banker, the Critic, the Playwright, the Christian, the Children’s writer, and the Publisher.
From his sensational debut with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1917 to the record-breaking success of ‘Cats’, the musical based on his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Eliot has never ceased to astonish. Among the film’s contributors, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney reads from The Waste Land and other poems, and explains why he reveres Eliot as a master of ‘soundscape’; Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks compares Eliot with his great admirer Bob Dylan; Jeanette Winterson remembers her devastating first encounter with his verseplay Murder in the Cathedral; Andrew Lloyd Webber describes playing the first score of Cats to Valerie Eliot; Susanna Smithson, Eliot’s God-daughter, reads a previously unknown poem called Cows – written for her family’s newsletter in 1938.
‘Best Documentary on the Arts’. Grierson: British Documentary Awards, 2011
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