Age Exchange, with Academic IT Services, welcomes you to this screening of “Meeting in No Man’s Land”. This is a 96 minute film documentary that captures a unique meeting between British and German descendants of First World War soldiers, nurses, and non-combatants, which took place in April 2016 in Bavaria. The film premiered at the BFI on the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and showed across Bavaria during the centenary of the end of that battle. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Age Exchange claims this is the only publicly-funded centenary project to cross the national boundaries between the former combatants.

The focus of Ivan Riches’ film is on the 24 family histories brought to life during this face-to-face encounter. He looks at how fathers, mothers, grandparents etc. passed their personal experience of the War to their descendants, exploring both the detail of those stories, as well as silence, trauma, and the War’s legacy within those families. Students from a high school in Munich were involved in the film, and the shared family histories and the digitised artefacts from World War One have been used by students from four schools in London to create their own stories and responses. This has led to the launch of a “Layar” (VR) app that can be used on mobile phones on the Institute of Education Battlefield Tours Programme.

The film will be followed by a brief panel discussion to include members of the film crew (like the producer, the director, cameraman, the composer of the music score), an elder who participated in the family history, a digital artist who created the VR app with the students, and a representative of the University’s Academic IT Services.

Book early, places are limited. Doors open at 17:30, screening starts at 18:00.