Bob Stanley

London Conversations: The Best of Saint Etienne is a video compilation album by the English electronic music group Saint Etienne

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Shot during the summer of 2005, this enigmatic film was the second collaboration between Saint Etienne and director Paul Kelly. It follows a young paperboy's adventure across London's last remaining wilderness in the Lea Valley on the eve of the Olympic development. A poetic ode to a metropolitan hinterland that has been forever changed by the impact of the 2012 Olympics games.

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A satirical look at Eurovision featuring cover versions of classic songs.

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Do you look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era as a lost golden age, or do you see it as a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? There’s a lot of nostalgia for the nineties at the moment, especially from people too young to remember it who see the decade as a simpler, pre-internet time. Modern nostalgia often draws on corporate American-90s mall culture, but what about British culture? With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name – director Alasdair McLellan evokes the era through the fog of memory. The resulting film, shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, is both beautiful and enveloping.

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Esther Johnson’s film uses local archive footage to convey the story of Sunderland's involvement in the First World War, from the men who fought in the fields to those who stayed behind to work in the region’s shipyards and munitions factories.

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Documentarian Paul Kelly returns to the festival with his latest collaboration with the band Saint Etienne, following the loose trilogy of London films Finisterre, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day and This Is Tomorrow, all recently published on BFI DVD. In the decade since Finisterre Kelly has built a reputation as a distinctive voice in British cinema, developing a lyrical style that draws on the psychogeography and people of the city and its culture. How We Used To Live is effectively a prequel to Finisterre, a meditation on London life today and a glance back at a receding Britain. Using colour footage from the 1950s to the 1980s, taken from the BFI National Archive, the film covers the ‘New Elizabethan’ age from the optimism of the post-war era to the dawn of Thatcherism. Soundtracked by Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs and scripted by the band’s Bob Stanley with Travis Elborough, the film is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their city. (Source: LFF programme)

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