Michael Kustow

A documentary following US, Peter Brook's experimental play about the moral issues surrounding the Vietnam War, Benefit of the Doubt is the only known film record of the Royal Shakespeare Company production. It was filmed by Peter Whitehead concurrently with his Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967), on the surface a very different film, yet both share a central concern with the war, protest and Britain's political and cultural relationship with America.

The Peloponnesian Wars (Athens versus Sparta for twenty-seven years) told in the format of news broadcast-like monologues by Theucydides, Plato, and others.

Adapted and directed by Peter Brook from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘production-in-progress US’, this long-unseen agitprop drama-doc – shot in London in 1967 and released only briefly in the UK and New York at the height of the Vietnam War – remains both thought-provoking and disturbing. A theatrical and cinematic social comment on US intervention in Vietnam, Brook’s film also reveals a 1960s London where art, theatre and political protest actively collude and where a young Glenda Jackson and RSC icons such as Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield feature prominently on the front line. Multi-layered scenarios staged by Brook combine with newsreel footage, demonstrations, satirical songs and skits to illustrate the intensity of anti-war opinion within London’s artistic and intellectual community.

A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century.

The story of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his life and career during the rule of Stalin.