| 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.
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