This week's Hyde Park Pick

Three years was a long time to be away from our building and sometimes as a team we dwell on the strange and tough elements of that period. But, truth be told it was also a really amazing time, largely down to the incredible films we were able to share with audiences in a fantastic set of supportive venues around the city.  

Since re-opening, finding opportunities to bring some of those films back into the Picture House has felt like a bit of a gift, allowing us to both revisit titles we loved but also play around with the impact an environment can have on the experience of seeing a film. This is at the heart of this week’s Hyde Park Pick which is 2020’s Night of the Kings. 

We played Night of the Kings in the summer of 2021 at the Pyramid Theatre at the University of Leeds Students Union. It felt so appropriate to play it in a theatre as whilst the films setting may be a prison, the power of storytelling and performance are two of the film’s central themes.

When a young man is sent to an infamous prison, located in the middle of the Ivorian forest and ruled by its inmates, he is chosen to take part in a storytelling ritual just as a violent battle for control bubbles to the surface. 

Coming back to Night of the Kings in the grandeur of the Picture House feels like an opportunity to revel in the film’s rich narrative as well as the strange tension between the scale of the community which feels almost like a kingdom, but also the claustrophobia that is such an inherent part of any film set inside a prison. 

The bubbling shifts of power on the precipice of changing hands, the precarity of a leader now forced to let go – Night of the Kings is often described as a thriller but there’s something Shakespearean at play here. Or at least that’s the parting feeling I had on my last watch. The joy of coming back to the film again though, when we play it on the 22 Feb, is that it'll provide another opportunity for me to decide what director Philippe Lacôte is trying to say to his audience; a chance to change my mind again.

Night of the Kings screens at HPPH on Thursday 22nd February at 20:30 – part of our Cinema Africa! strand.