Broken English
Singer-songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull is too big for a simple documentary. Instead, a theatrical “Department of Not Forgetting” interweaves intimate interviews, archival clips, and newly recorded performances to conjure a holistic understanding of a career spanning more than half a century.
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Friday, May 8, 2026
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Friday, May 15, 2026
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A typical music documentary would be insufficient to properly interrogate the breadth, depth, and complicated history of English recording artist, actress, and pop celebrity Marianne Faithfull's half-century in the public eye. Eschewing the stale predictability of cookie-cutter documentaries, Broken English directors Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth (20,000 Days on Earth, SIFF 2014) instead re-imagine the format entirely by conjuring a retro-futuristic "Department of Not Forgetting" (an act that's emphatically different from "Remembering"). The apparatus of theatrical artifice is an odd yet admirable choice that allows a meandering tour through the details of her personal life and prolific career that break through the narrow frame of her relationship with Mick Jagger, sex, and drugs. Presided over by an enigmatic character played by Tilda Swinton in a control room on an enigmatic soundstage, the film creates a series of fragmented indulgences, including a podcast-style debate table and a recording studio where longtime admirers, including Beth Orton, Courtney Love, and Thurston Moore, perform cover versions of Faithfull's songs. Among the greatest successes of these unconventional choices, though, is the ability to witness a still clever-witted Marianne Faithfull in her last days on Earth reacting to archival clips shown to her by George MacKay on an old-timey television. The effect recalls a strident Michael Jordan addressing that iPad in "The Last Dance", a contrast of the perspective of the passage of time and the still-raw intimacy of unhealed wounds. Filmed during Faithfull's recovery from a severe case of COVID-19, the documentary concludes with her final recorded performance, alongside Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. It's a moving and appropriately idiosyncratic coda to an exceptional public life.
—Josh Bis
- Director: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
- Principal Cast: Marianne Faithfull, Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Sophia Di Martino
- Country: United Kingdom
- Year: 2025
- Running Time: 99 min.
- Producer: Beth Earl
- Screenplay: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
- Cinematographers: Daniel Landin
- Editors: Luke Clayton Thompson
- Music: Rob Ellis
- Website: Official Film Website
- Filmography: Pollard & Forsyth: The Extraordinary Miss Flower (2024), 20,000 Days on Earth (2014)
- Language: English
- International Sales: The Festival Agency, Cinetic (US/NA), Global Constellation (Intl)