POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

Originally known as the mad genius behind the “stomping foot” and other iconic animations for the legendary Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry Gilliam got his first taste of directing when he co-helmed the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. Over the following decades, Gilliam evolved into one of cinema’s great visionaries, a Hollywood outsider whose work stood firmly against the factory line of corporate moviemaking.

 

A completely untamed talent, Gilliam was rarely on time or on budget, but always delivered with breath-taking originality, amassing a filmography that includes Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and many more.

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Chief among his achievements is his 1985 opus Brazil, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Considered one of the greatest cult films of all time, and boasting a 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes—it’s a wild satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporate statism, and state capitalism. It’s a sharp kick in the teeth to the very systems Gilliam’s madcap creative genius has spent decades railing against.

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The story follows hapless low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce - Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones), who repeatedly daydreams about rescuing the same beautiful woman. Just before Christmas (yes, it’s a kind of bizarre Christmas movie), Sam discovers an administrative error at work that has led to the accidental arrest, and subsequent death, of an innocent man, while the fugitive terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) remains at large. As Sam tries to untangle the mess, he encounters the woman from his dreams (Kim Greist) and unintentionally turns himself into an enemy of the state. What follows is his hilarious and beautifully bizarre struggle to navigate a dystopian, polluted, hyper-consumerist, and suffocatingly bureaucratic world in the desperate hope of making sense of it all.

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A landmark film brimming with unfettered visual imagination, Brazil remains a true masterwork, a madcap classic that, even 40 years later, fizzes with invention, relevance, and Gilliam’s signature brand of sharp, absurd, dark comedy. At once sad, uplifting, harrowing, and hopeful, it’s a true alternative Christmas treat. Don’t miss our special 40th-anniversary screening, which will conclude our 2025 film programme.