Talk #49

Gideon Koppel

Gideon Koppel is an artist and filmmaker, whose work has been screened internationally and exhibited in galleries from Tate Modern in London to MoMA New York.

For several years he made commercials and films for fashion designers, including a film installation for Comme des Garçons, shown at the Florence Biennale. His first work for broadcast television was ‘Jones’ – a maverick BBC drama, styled as a German expressionist film and based on the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones. It is apparently the only film ever made which features a Welsh-speaking Freud. Koppel won the 2010 Guardian First Feature Film Award for his critically acclaimed Sleep Furiously which has a soundtrack by Aphex Twin. The novelist John Banville described ‘sleep furiously’ as ‘a mutely gorgeous, moving and deeply poetic work of art… simply, a masterpiece’. He is Professor of Film at Manchester School of Art and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton, University of Oxford.