Threads
18
Why watch?
“The bleakness of this film is its focus on ordinary people facing an inhuman event- the fallout of a nuclear catastrophe. An eerily realistic concept for us now in 2026 as it was for the genuinely horrified audiences in 1984, and 1985 respectively. The date of its original broadcast was hailed as ‘the night the world didn’t sleep’. Merging fact and fiction, director Mick Jackson and writer Barry Hines researched the scientific and medical truths of the effects of a nuclear event. Juxtapose this with fictional lives of young and old living in South Yorkshire, and what you get is a terrifying, and scarily realistic representation of how you, me and everything we know and love can be destroyed in an instant.”
Alice Duggan,
Cinema Venue Coordinator
More cinema of despair this Bleak Week
Young lovers Ruth and Jimmy decide to get married after Ruth unexpectedly gets pregnant. But their quiet lives in Sheffield, England, are threatened when the Soviet Union and United States go to war. After a nuclear attack destroys a NATO base 20 miles from Sheffield, the town falls into chaos. Ruth and Jimmy are separated as the fallout spreads. Ruth must struggle to survive alone in the post-apocalyptic landscape.
Threads is an important and understandably devastating response to the (nuclear) state of Britain in the 1980s. It is arguably the bleakest film ever to be broadcast on the BBC and remains as powerful and terrifying as ever.
Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair is presented in partnership with the American Cinematheque and Prince Charles Cinema.
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