Our North is going global with help from Rare Giants, Sheffield’s purveyors of restored masterworks and underappreciated classics from the history of world cinema. From October – December 2019, they’re presenting Cities of Seven Hills: a season of film taking inspiration from Sheffield’s taxing topography and its semi-mythical sisterhood with cities of similarly steep geography, not least the original City of Seven Hills – Rome.

Screenings will explore Sheffield’s cinematic heritage by looking outward for global stories that reflect on and speak to local concerns. Through a series of pre-screening introductions, the Rare Giants programmers will place the season’s selections in conversation with famous depictions of Sheffield on screen.

Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s Rome-set neorealist masterpiece about a postman struggling to make ends meet while maintaining a relationship with his son, finds a perhaps unlikely partner in The Full Monty – one of Sheffield’s most famous cinematic contributions and a film that offers its own examination of masculinity, fatherhood and dignity for those in dire financial straits. Closer to home, Distant Voices, Still Lives sees Pete Postlethwaite deliver a powerhouse performance as the violent patriarch of a working class family in WWII-era Liverpool; a key early role for the actor that stands in sharp contrast to his later work in South Yorkshire-set films like Among Giants and Brassed Off.

And the season closes with Ten: Abbas Kiarostami’s minimalist dissection of Iranian culture that puts familial and societal tensions under the microscope as a female taxi driver plays chauffeur to a vocal cross-section of Tehran’s population. The taxi driver as a witness to political upheaval is a device also found in My Son the Fanatic – the Yorkshire-set story of an immigrant Pakistani taxi driver whose life begins to unravel as he loses his son to religion and begins an ill-fated relationship with a sex worker.