The penultimate film in the current season of LRB Screen, London Reviewed – which explores visions of London created by non-British filmmakers – is the only feature made in the UK by the celebrated, singular Finnish writer/director, Aki Kaurismäki. I Hired a Contract Killer is a brilliantly downbeat, witty and moving comedy of errors, which also serves as a vivid document of the city at a moment of transition, in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang.

Henri Boulanger (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a lonely French man in a dead-end office job with the London waterworks, is made redundant with immediate effect, due to privatisation. Having nothing left to live for, he repeatedly fails to kill himself. Hearing by chance about contract killers, he arranges for a contract to be taken out on himself. However, when he meets flower seller Margaret (Margi Clark), he changes his mind, which is when his real problems start…

Introducing I Hired a Contract Killer and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be the architectural and cultural historian (and LRB regular), Owen Hatherley. 

A special screening of Roberto Rossellini’s most joyful film at London’s oldest parish church – the first film screening in Great St Barts’ more than 900-year history, 800 years on from the death of Francis of Assisi on 3 October 1226. With special guest Alice Goodman.

In a series of simple vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s jester – as the film’s Italian title puts it). Gorgeously photographed to evoke the paintings of Francis’s time, and cast with actual monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment. Loosely based on the anonymous 14th-century Italian novel Fioretti di San Francesco (Little Flowers of St Francis), François Truffaut called it the most beautiful film in the world.

Joining regular host Gareth Evans to introduce The Flowers of St Francis – and the historic, saintly, mythic, maverick figure of Francis of Assisi – will be the poet and Anglican rector Alice Goodman, best known as the librettist for John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, two of the most celebrated and significant operas of recent times.

Lydia Davis will reflect on some of the concepts of the Stoic philosophers, especially the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, author of a private notebook of meditations written, many of them, in his tent on a battlefield. She will associate these concepts with the ideas conveyed by other texts, including some of the English sonnets, and will also describe her attempts to try out the ideas of the Stoics on the vagaries of her own daily life in a world that, while culturally so distinct from that of Marcus Aurelius, shares the same challenges presented by such difficult passions as anger, envy, grief, ambition and fear of death.

Lydia Davis is the author of a novel and eight story collections as well as two books of essays and many translations. In 1999 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2015 an Officier, both for her fiction and translations. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Her latest book is Into the Weeds, about a lifetime of reading and writing.

In the first of a new series of talks examining the cultural legacy of Elizabeth David, the chef and food writer Jeremy Lee and the novelist Tessa Hadley will discuss her influence on postwar taste.

In Tessa Hadley’s Free Love (2022), a woman in a 1960s London suburb cooks an Elizabeth David recipe for a dinner party. Jeremy Lee remembers his mother cooking from David’s books in 1970s Dundee. Hadley and Lee will talk about the habits and manners of postwar dining in relation to their own work.

Elizabeth David and ... is a series of talks and podcasts presented in partnership between the Warburg Institute and the LRB. Each conversation pairs food and literary writers to explore aspects of Elizabeth David’s life, work and legacy. Events continue every two months; further pairings will be announced soon.