LONDONERS | Sideline Collective

LONDONERS: a vintage film about modern-day London. To launch the BFI’s newly-restored Mitchell & Kenyon Archive of Edwardian films, we partnered with Channel 4 to make a new film using the same 100-year-old technology. 'Londoners' is proof that even though the original archive was filmed 100 years ago, very little has actually changed.

LONDONERS: In the early 1900’s filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon would travel the country, filming the local population, documenting the very first human reactions to a camera. In an era obsessed with digital technology and an increasingly camera-skeptic public, Londoners is an attempt to recreate this spectacle using the same technology and filming techniques. It was filmed entirely on a 100 year old wooden hand-cranked 35mm camera, and documents thousands of people happily interacting directly with the camera, almost exactly as they did 100 years ago. This film is proof that people today are not that different from the people in Mitchell and Kenyon’s films. In fact, once you watch Londoners, you realise that even after over a century of progress, very little has changed at all.

A Channel 4 co-production and part of the BFI National Archive.