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The Red Shoes

Pamela Hutchinson, Lisa Mullen, Sarah Crompton and Lillian Crawford join Matthew Sweet to look at the career of film-makers Powell and Pressburger ahead of a BFI UK-wide season.

The dancer Moira Shearer starred in the 1948 film written, directed, and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which reworks a Hans Christian Andersen story, mixed with elements of ballet history and the founding of the Ballet Russes by Diaghilev. The film, about the tangled relationships between a dancer, composer and ballet impresario, had a cast involving many professional dancers, and gained five Academy Award nominations including best score for Brian Easdale. As the BFI prepares a UK-wide season of Powell and Pressburger films running from 16th October to 31st December (including a re-release of The Red Shoes), Matthew Sweet is joined by film critics Lillian Crawford, Pamela Hutchinson, dance reviewer Sarah Crompton and New Generation Thinker and film lecturer Lisa Mullen.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

You can find Matthew Sweet presenting Radio 3's regular strand devoted to film and TV music Sound of Cinema on Saturday afternoons at 3pm and available on ±«Óãtv Sounds and a whole host of Free Thinking episodes devoted to classics of cinema are in a collection on the programme website labelled Landmarks including: Jean Paul Belmondo and the French New Wave, Marlene Dietrich, Dirk Bogarde and the Servant, Bette Davis, Sidney Poitier, Asta Nielsen.

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45 minutes

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