The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) announces their upcoming program as part of GREAT Britain Arts 13, a year-long celebration of UK arts and culture through 13 major events across Melbourne and Sydney. ACMI will be celebrating the best of British filmmaking from September 2013 showcasing classic restorations alongside innovative filmmaking talents.

The season opens with the Australian premiere of Julien Temple's London - The Modern Babylon. Using found footage Temple knits together a vision of London that is resilient and constantly up for the challenge to renew in the face of depressions, world wars, riots and coronations and the changing face of demographics. He utilises footage from newsreels, home movies and interviews with everyday citizens to showcase the vibrancy and history of London. Much of the found footage will be seen for the first time by many, showing life of yesteryear and today in a clip-collage format and as Peter Bradshaw stated in The Guardian 'the juxtapositions are witty and bold... Temple finds flickering black-and-white footage from the Victorian and Edwardian capital and will splice it with 80s analogue video, showing Margaret Thatcher outside Downing Street. No sooner have we registered a grand gentleman in a tall hat in turn-of-the-century Piccadilly Circus, than Temple shrewdly brings in footage of the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, showing a smirking Winston Churchill, in his tall hat, making the most of all the excitement' The score too adds an additional layer to the collage, drawing on Temple's background of music documenting and features sounds from The Sex Pistols to cockney knees-up The Lambeth Walk and Brit-pop. A film that is as much a history of a London and the UK as it is what Variety Magazine called "a swooning, punch-drunk love letter to one of the world's greatest cities”.