Screen Archive South East cordially invites you to experience both the grim and the joyous events of seventy-five years ago by watching its new archive film – ‘War & Peace’. This free-to-view experience, almost all of which is in vivid colour, commemorates Britain’s wartime Home Front as seen through the eyes of film makers from our region and culminates in all the exhilaration and exuberance of the celebrations that took place that May in 1945 – VE Day.

‘War & Peace’ features highlights like Woking’s ‘walking’ Anderson shelter, children in Hove wearing their gasmasks in class, a Bugatti fire-engine off to an ‘incident’ in Surrey, sinister casualty vehicles in Herne Bay, Spitfires at Tangmere, Land Girls ploughing up the Downs with their tractors, a family in Surrey, along with their pet dog, posing in respirators, the ‘real’ Dad’s Army armed with broomsticks in West Clandon and the terrible and tragic aftermath of Brighton’s Blitz – before ending with the most joyous and biggest outdoor party this nation has ever seen – when there was dancing in towns and villages, where GIs jitter-bugged their way all over London and there was food, glorious food, despite the rationing, stacked high on tables in Brighton in Sussex and Manston in Kent.

Many of the films used in this presentation have never been seen in public before and it’s accompanied by a specially commissioned score from the award-winning screen composer Nina Humphreys.

Watch: ‘War & Peace’ http://screenarchive.brighton.ac.uk/detail/13714/