Killing Time
2000, 90 minutes
Themes of transition, death and birth, at once ...
Themes of transition, death and birth, at once painful and liberating are explored in Killing Time, a feature-length film of Simon Armitage's 1000-line millenium poem of the same name, broadcast on New Year's Day, 2000. Mixing documentary, drama and poetry, we follow a 'millenium man' as he roams the country, meeting real people and collecting millenial offerings, things that people have jettisoned to begin a new life, including a former IRA man who has renounced violence, a terminal cancer patient who is throwing away a pair of running shoes, a bankrupt farmer throwing away beef on the bone, and a man about to become a woman. Meanwhile, Armitage's epic poem narrates the many grim events of recent years, the Columbine high school shootings, the Paddington rail crash, the London nail bombings. Familiar stories and images are recast as surreal events reflecting an age of cynicism, materiality and media overload.
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