Delighted to announce this new film, War Book' as directed by Tom Harper and music composed by Jack C Arnold - screenings in October as part of the BFi Film Festival

Screenwriter Jack Thorne and director Tom Harper return to the LFF after premiering their debut feature, The Scouting Book for Boys, at the Festival in 2009. Their follow-up, War Book, is smartly ambitious and delivered on a minuscule budget by three principals in their early 30s but with impressive experience already between them: Thorne, one of the UK’s ascendant screenwriters, established in TV with This Is England, Skins, and his newest C4 series, Glue; Harper who is currently directing his third feature, The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, and who comes with considerable TV experience, including Peaky Blinders, Misfits and The Borrowers; and also producer Lauren Dark, fast emerging through distinguishing work on short films and at Sixteen Films working with Rebecca O’Brien.

In War Book, they have created a post-nuclear-era political thriller, set almost entirely in one room. An exercise in punchy, intelligent writing, the story unfolds through dialogue fired at rapid pace and with plot and characterisation revealed largely through verbal exchange. It’s a risky strategy in an age when filmmakers are told to ‘show, not tell’, but it pays off, with the exceptional cast (including Sophie Okonedo, Ben Chaplin and Anthony Sher, Shaun Evans, Kerry Fox and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) helping to deliver a chilling examination of bleak pragmatism at the heart of British politics.

  Buy tickets for War Book, screening in the Debate strand