“In 2012, I managed to visit and film Hacienda Tetlapayac, where Eisenstein spent much of 1931, frantically reading and writing as well as filming. Unexpectedly, Tetlapayac remains just as it appears in Eisenstein and Tisse’s footage, having served as a location for a surprising range of films, as we now know. Our film draws on these, following the idiosyncratic twists and turns in Eisenstein’s memoir ‘Beyond the Stars’.
Like this, it has a large cast of characters and references that runs from Douglas Fairbanks as the first screen Zorro, stirring the young Sergei’s interest in cinema, up to Antonio Banderas as his most recent incarnation. Other guest appearances include Leon Trotsky, Spencer Tracy, Serge Daney and Derek Jarman, filming his ‘Imagining October’ in Moscow with Peter Wollen, just before the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika”. - Ian Christie
We welcome Ian Christie to introduce the film.
