Great stuff

Someone left an accusation a while back that I didn't like anything except trains and the BFI (that's the British Film Institute for you unfortunates who are not yet in the know). And there was an element of truth in that charge. Here's why -- a trailer for the BFI's brilliant restoration of Turksib, a classic piece of early Soviet cinema that was hugely influential in Britain. It's about the construction of a railway line from Turkmenistan to Siberia, in 1929 (so it's a silent film, with a modern score):



And not content with releasing extraordinary Blu-rays like that (on the same disk is probably the single most famous British documentary film ever, Night Mail, an unutterably brilliant piece of cinema featuring words by WH Auden, music by Benjamin Britten...)... er, not content with that, the BFI also releases DVDs in a label called "The Flipside", featuring extraordinary, long-forgotten 1950s-70s British cinema:



How cool is all that? (Oh: some of the films are, of course, shite. But that's not the point.) How could anyone not love an institution whose job it is to do that?