May 8 @ 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
NB: This film is being shown on 8th May due to County Council elections on 1st May 2025.
On May 8th, Lee Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane, Co-Director of the Lee Miller Archives at the Farley Arts Trust will be joining us for a Q&A session. Don’t miss it! It will be a privilege to hear Ami talk about her grandmother’s life and work and answer our questions.
We are also very grateful to Anthony Penrose of the Farley Trust for offering to waive their normal performance fee for our event, however a donation from every ticket sold will go to the Trust.
In Lee, Kate Winslet stars as Lee Miller – the fashion model turned war photojournalist for British Vogue. The film shows Miller as she “documents war as historical evidence”. As a female war correspondent at that time, she was barred from entering active battle zones but none the less was not spared from witnessing and recording moving and horrific scenes beyond the areas of immediate combat.
In the film Lee Miller works along side Life Magazine photojournalist David E. Scherman, played by Andy Samberg. They worked on many shared assignments, including documenting the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau . Scherman’s iconic photograph of Miller
sitting in the bathtub in Adolf Hitler’s private apartment in Munich, with the dried mud of that morning’s visit to Dachau on her boots – deliberately dirtying Hitler’s bathroom, – was taken in the evening of 30 April 1945, coincidentally the same day that Hitler committed suicide . After posing for the bathtub photograph, Miller took a bath in the tub, and then slept in Hitler’s bed.
After the war Miller fought hard against the repression of her confronting war images in a world that preferred to forget the atrocities that had taken place.
That Miller’s work is known today is mainly due to the efforts of her son, Antony Penrose, who has been studying, conserving, and promoting his mother’s work since the early 1980s. Never having known about her war work while she was alive, Penrose later discovered sixty thousand or so photographs, negatives , documents, journals, cameras, love letters, and souvenirs in cardboard boxes and trunks in the attic of Farley Farm, the family home.
Lee (2023) Certificate 15. Directed by Ellen Kuras. 117 minutes. English.
Directed by Ellen Kuras. English.
