A 35mm screening of the 1996 film Beautiful Thing, part of the RIP IT UP season by Reclaim The Frame, celebrating the film's 30th anniversary.
Beautiful Thing is back on the big screen at Plymouth Arts Cinema on Saturday 3 October, as part of the Rip It Up season. It's a 35mm screening, so the film runs from a real reel rather than a digital file, which is how it first went out in cinemas.
Directed by Hettie Macdonald and written by Jonathan Harvey, who adapted his own stage play, Beautiful Thing (1996) was originally commissioned by Channel 4 Films as a television movie. It premiered at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival — now BFI Flare — where it won the Best Film Award, and played in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes before its UK theatrical release in June 1996. From there, it became a landmark of British queer cinema.
Set on a South East London council estate, it follows neighbours Jamie and Ste as their friendship deepens into first love over one long, hot summer, with Jamie's mum Sandra and their neighbour Leah alongside them and the music of Mama Cass beating through it all. The Guardian called it 'a low-key gem', and Little White Lies described it as 'an ode to youth grounded in the reality of what it meant to grow up queer in '90s Britain'.
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This screening is part of a 30th-anniversary campaign by Reclaim The Frame, which is itself part of the BFI Film Audience Network's UK-wide Rip It Up season. The return to the big screen is supported by the BFI, National Lottery funding, and Film4. If Saturday doesn't work, there's a second screening on Wednesday 7 October. Both are at Plymouth Arts Cinema, Tavistock Place, Plymouth, PL4 8AT.
