Past Events and Screenings

Join us for an evening of short documentaries, from different parts of the world, covering a wide range of topics. Shorts at the Frontline Club showcases moving, striking and funny films, exploring the many different faces of documentary filmmaking.

The Members’ drinks evening will return in September, taking place on Thursday 4 September, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.

Our friends at Chivas Brothers will sponsor the drinks as usual. All members are welcome. Please RSVP to Sophie Kayes.

As a teenager, programming prodigy Aaron Swartz took the Internet community by storm. His intellect and understanding matched its most seasoned members. Today, his fingerprints are all over the Internet, from his help in the development of the basic Internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit. But Swartz’s groundbreaking work in social justice combined with his aggressive approach to information access ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare, with fatal consequences.

Three short films explore life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Academy Award-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin uses the Berlin Wall rabbit population as a metaphor for the huge transition post-communist societies underwent.

Through exceptional and rare footage shot between 10 and 20 October 1989, EXIT shows East German refugees who managed to cross the Polish border in order to reach the West German embassy in Warsaw. They talk openly about life in East Germany, not knowing the world is about to change.

During the communist dictatorship in Romania (1945-1989), thousands of people risked their lives attempting to flee their country, often inventing the most incredible methods to cross the border illegally. Oxygen is a free re-enactment of a real case.

In a journey across the settlements, the roads and the Separation Wall of the West Bank, Eyal Weizman demonstrates how architecture is central to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and how his work on the architecture of occupation has led him to understand the discipline’s role in modern urban warfare. This Al Jazeera Rebel Architecture preview screening will be followed by a discussion with director Ana Naomi de Sousa and protagonist and architect Eyal Weizman.

In our next Members’ BookNight we welcome Nick Davies, who will be talking about his book Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch. The book exposes the inside story that engulfed Fleet Street, Scotland Yard and Downing Street after the initial revelations of July 2011 that journalists from The News of the World hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler creating a public outrage.

This summer the Frontline Club is heading to Wilderness Festival and we hope to see you all there.
We will be bringing together a panel of journalists who have covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to shed light on what has been happening on the ground. They will be discussing how this latest escalation is different from those we have seen in the past and the perils of reporting this age-old conflict.

Belarus is governed by Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. In the run-up to the 2010 presidential election and for a year afterwards, filmmaker Madeleine Sackler followed the trials and tribulations of Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theatre company based in Minsk and led by Natalia and Nikolai. This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Madeleine Sackler via Skype.

The 4,500-kilometer (2,800-mile) Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhgorod gas pipeline connects the second-largest gas field in the world in Urengoy, West Siberia, with the Western European market. It has become one of the most vital arteries of the Russian economy, with Vladimir Putin claiming that its gas and oil revenues account for half of Russia’s disposable capital. For 104 days, renowned director Vitaly Mansky followed the course of this Trans-Siberian gas pipeline through seven different countries. Pipeline is a visually refined road movie offering an unsettling portrait of the legendary Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, on which much of Europe is still reliant.

In the early hours of 4 June 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on a pro-democracy protest killing untold hundreds of people. Twenty five years on the event has been commemorated around the world, but how does China remembers this defining moment in the country’s history?

Since Rich Peppiatt’s hilariously withering resignation letter to Daily Star proprietor, Richard Desmond, became a viral sensation in 2011, his brutal honesty has made him a regular tabloid commentator on TV and radio. In One Rogue Reporter, he lampoons the hypocrisy and dishonesty of his former employers through a series of mischievous stunts and interviews with heavyweights from the worlds of journalism, film, comedy and politics. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Rich Peppiatt. Chaired by Stewart Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University. He is a former editor-in-chief and CEO of ITN, Ofcom’s Partner for Content and Standards, and author of When Reporters Cross The Line: The Heroes, the Villains, the Hackers and the Spies.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind’s portraits of ‘fighters’ and ‘mourners’ from Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev from February 2014, captured with an air of stillness and reflection, show the individuals involved in, and impacted by, the unrest. She will be joined in conversation by Olivier Laurent, editor of TIME’s LightBox.

Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square will be published in its entirety by GOST Books on Thursday 24 July 2014. Join Taylor-Lind for the official launch and signing on the book at the club from 6:30 PM. For more details, see here.

It is just over a year since protests to save Istanbul’s Gezi Park escalated after being met by an uncompromising stance from the government and a police crackdown. As the protests continue and with the country due to vote in the first round of the presidential elections in early August, we will be bringing together a panel to gauge the political climate. With accusations of cronyism and mass corruption inside the government, we will explore what the protestors are fighting for and how much support they have across the country.

The infamous Club Quiz returns in July with quizmasters Caroline Johns and Dr Keith Surridge.

Teams can consist of up to six people and the entry cost is £5 per person. All money raised goes to the Frontline Fund, assisting families of fixers and support staff killed or injured while working with the international media.

Seeds of Hope follows multiple-rape victim Masika Katsuva, who has rescued some 6,000 women and children in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by offering them shelter in her centre. Filmmaker Fiona Lloyd-Davies follows Katsuva and the centre’s inhabitants, as they reshape their lives to build a new future. The film also speaks with the perpetrators, among them soldiers from the Congolese army, who give extraordinarily open testimony as to why they rape and their attitudes toward their horrific acts. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Fiona Lloyd-Davies.

Join us for another evening of short documentaries, from different parts of the world, covering a wide range of topics. Shorts at the Frontline Club showcases moving, striking and funny films, exploring the many different faces of documentary filmmaking.

For the second of our Members’ BookNights we welcome the esteemed Tim Butcher. Shortly after the centennial of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, he will be talking about his book The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War.

On 3 August 2010, border police discover a decomposing male body beneath a cicada tree deep in Arizona’s sun-blistered Sonora Desert. Director Marc Silver chronicles the story of this migrant found in the strip of desert known as “the corridor of death”. This one life becomes testimony to the tragic results of the US war on immigration. As the forensic investigation unfolds, Mexican actor and activist Gael Garcia Bernal retraces this man’s steps along the migrant trail in Central America. This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Marc Silver.

The next members’ drinks evening will take place on Thursday 5 June, from 6 to 8pm.

Our friends at Chivas Regal will sponsor the drinks as usual. All members are welcome. Please RSVP to Membership Co-ordinator, Sophie Nagovitsyna.

Acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese and his longtime documentary collaborator David Tedeschi pay homage to a 20th century American institution: The New York Review of Books. The film weaves rarely seen archival material, interviews and excerpts from writings by such icons as James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and Joan Didion. These scenes reflect the humming and restless energy of a magazine that still feels as vital as its indefatigable founding editor, Robert Silvers. This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Anthony Wall, series editor of BBC Arena.