A Message from Mars
- London
- 1913
A teenage boy breaks all the rules of rock climbing to reach the top of an off-limits Lake District mountain.
A healthy dose of fresh air, a few risky situations and good-natured pranks make this Children Film Foundation film a most enjoyable watch. David is a stubborn London teenager with a sense of his own superiority. Spending a couple of weeks at a boys-only youth club in the Lake District, he gets frustrated when forbidden to climb a local mountain - due to a protected eagle nesting at the top - and plots a secret ascent. What could go wrong?
Thanks to decades of DVD and online publishing, not to mention archive revivals and restorations, more of Britain’s screen heritage is available today than ever before. You might even be forgiven for imagining that the whole of British cinema is now just a click away.
But much of that history - from the silent era to the relatively recent past - remains out of reach. This selection from the vaults, hand-picked by the BFI's curators, goes some way to remedying that. These fresh rediscoveries offer something for all tastes: whether futuristic fantasy, battle-of-the-sexes comedy, subversive provocation or an Indian-British rarity.