Dir: Robina Rose, 1981, UK, 68 mins, Cert: 18 (CTBA)
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Wed 28 October // 20:00
Tickets: £6
Shot over a handful of nights in the Portobello Hotel where director Robina Rose herself worked, Nightshift transforms the routines of hotel reception into a dreamlike nocturnal odyssey. Punk icon Jordan stars as a hotel clerk who observes an eccentric parade of guests, musicians, aristocrats, drifters and insomniacs passing through the lobby as London slips deeper into the night.
Part autobiography, part experiment and part waking dream, Nightshift draws together key figures from Britain's countercultural underground, photographed by American independent filmmaker Jon Jost and scored by Simon Jeffes of Penguin Cafe Orchestra. At once a time capsule of early-80s Notting Hill and a mesmerising reflection on work, boredom and imagination, Rose's singular feature finds beauty, humour and mystery in the long hours between dusk and dawn.
Nightshift has been digitally restored by Lightbox Film Center (Philadelphia) in collaboration with the British Film Institute and Cinenova. Restoration funding provided by Ron and Suzanne Naples. Film distributed by Cinenova.
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Made just a year apart, Simone Barbès or Virtue and Nightshift offer two distinct but deeply connected visions of women working through the night. Set in a Paris porn cinema and a West London hotel, they place female workers at the centre of worlds usually seen from elsewhere, observing the desires, dramas and absurdities unfolding around them.
Emerging from radical, low-budget independent film scenes in France and Britain, both films are fascinated by the strange texture of nocturnal time: the waiting, wandering, watching and daydreaming that happens between tasks. Funny, atmospheric and richly humane, they reveal the city after dark as a place of both alienation and possibility.
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