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Alongside Arnolfini’s On Purpose: Design Concepts exhibition, we present a season of films (mainly Double Bills), which play on its wider themes: the experience economy, altered identities and the theatre of consumption. Catch a selection of short films that continue to explore the relationship between commerce, design and experience, inserted into the cinema ad reel during this season. Buy one get one free, in other words.

Double Bill

Sun 28 Sep, 3.30pm & 5.30pm

Back to the Future 2 (PG) & Repo Man (18) + Short

The time tripping sequel, with branding all over the place. Arriving in 2015, Marty utilizes an envious assortment of future products; the automatic Nikes and iconic hoverboard among the most memorable.

Dir. Robert Zemeckis USA 1989 1h 48m

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Fired from his supermarket job, punk kid Otto soon finds himself in the exciting world of the Repo Man: car chases, quick money, unidentified glowing objects in car boots and generic/anti product placement. Dir. Alex Cox USA 1984 1h 32m

Dawn of the Dead (18) + Short

Sat 4 Oct, 7.30pm & Sun 5 Oct, 8pm

A shopping mall becomes the site of a zombie apocalypse. Playing the metaphor of American consumerism so straight that it still manages to hit fever pitch as a horror movie, Dawn of the Dead is rightly considered a classic of 70s cinema.

Dir. George A. Romero USA 1978 2h

Double Bill

The Fountainhead (PG) & Playtime (U) + Short

Sun 19 Oct, 3.30pm & 5.40pm

Gary Cooper plays a fiercely independent architect, obviously patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright, who is determined to retain his artistic integrity at all costs. The Fountainhead remains one of the strangest and most florid pictures of its time, possibly of all time.

Dir. King Vidor USA 1949 1h 54m

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In Tati’s modernist classic, M. Hulot and a group of American tourists try to navigate through a futuristic Paris of modern conveniences; glass and steel high rises, concrete roads and plastic furnishings.

Dir. Jacques Tati France 1964 2h 4m

Double Bill

eXistenZ (15) & The Truman Show (PG) + Short

Sun 26 Oct, 3.30pm & 5.40pm

Cronenberg has long been fascinated by the ways new technology shapes and manipulates human perception and the physical world. In this futuristic thriller, a designer creates a game that can be downloaded straight into the central nervous system.

Dir. David Cronenberg USA 1999 1h 36m.

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Truman Burbank’s struggle to assert control over his own manufactured life in a vast television studio, where everyone but the eponymous hero is an actor, is brilliantly conceived in a film crafted with rare and immaculate precision.

Dir. Peter Weir USA 1998 1h 43m

Double Bill

Westworld (15) & Punishment Park (18) + Short

Sun 2 Nov, 3.30pm & 5.30pm

A holiday resort offers punters the ultimate licence to abuse mechanical actors in realistic robot worlds recreating ancient Rome, a medieval chateau, or a gun slinging frontier town. But the machines, led by Yul Brynner’s iconic badlands avenger prove increasingly unwilling to play along.

Dir. Michael Crichton USA 1973 1h 28m

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In an imagined world all too close to reality, draft-dodging radicals are given a stark choice: go to prison or spend three days in Punishment Park. This dystopian nightmare still grips,imagining hippies and radicals getting used for target practice in an eerie, if hysterical, prefiguring of modern reality TV.

Dir: Peter Watkins USA 1971 1h 29m