Killing Time (2000)

Killing Time is the feature-length film of Simon Armitage’s 1000-line millennium poem of the same name, broadcast on New Year's Day, 2000.

Mixing documentary, drama and poetry, we follow a ‘millennium man’ (Christopher Eccleston) as he roams the country, meeting real people and collecting millennial offerings, things that people have jettisoned to begin a new life.

We meet a former IRA man who has renounced violence, a terminal cancer patient who is throwing away a pair of running shoes, a bankrupt farmer throwing away beef on the bone, a man entering the priesthood, a man about to become a woman and a woman about to have a baby.

Meanwhile, Armitage’s epic poem narrates the many grim events of recent years, the Columbine high school shootings, the Paddington rail crash, the London nail-bombings. Familiar stories and images are recast as surreal events reflecting an age of cynicism, materiality and media overload.

Themes of transition, death and birth, at once painful and liberating are explored in this unique and acclaimed film.