Picturehouse acquires David Hockney doc

Picturehouse Entertainment has acquired Randall Wright’s feature documentary on artist David Hockney and will open it across the UK on Nov 28.

The launch of Hockney will be driven by an exclusive preview at cinemas around the UK, followed by a satellite Q&A with David Hockney live from his studio in Los Angeles on Nov 25.

The 77-year-old artist granted unprecedented access to his personal archive of photographs and films for the documentary for the first time.

An important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and is perhaps most famous for his series of paintings of swimming pools, including 1967 work A Bigger Splash.

The documentary chronicles Hockney’s career, from his early life in working-class Bradford, where his love for pictures was developed through his admiration for cinema, to his relocation to Hollywood where his life long struggle to escape labels such as queer and working class was fully realised.

It also explores how his upbringing and life experiences give him the willpower to survive relationship problems, and later the AIDS epidemic, but also allowed him to create some of the most renowned works of the past century.

Hockney is produced by Kate Ogborn of Fly Film, who most recently produced Ken Loach’s documentary The Spirit of ‘45 and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea.

Wright’s previous work includes Lucian Freud: A Painted Life. The director met Hockney while directing Shock of the Old, a BBC Omnibus film about major artists inspired by pictures in the National Gallery.

In 2003, at Panavision studios in Hollywood, he made a film called Secret Knowledge, demonstrating Hockney’s theory that painters used cameras hundreds of years before the invention of chemical photography. The film won the Grierson and FIFA awards.

Financiers of Hockney are the BFI, BBC Arts, Screen Yorkshire, British Film Company and Smithsonian Channel.

Executive producers are Denys Blakeway, Lisa Marie Russo, Lizzie Francke, Mark Bell, Hugo Heppell, Steve Milne, Christian Eisenbeiss, David Royle and Charles Poe.